Perplexity's India freemium gambit yields millions of users and rising revenue

In mid-2025, Perplexity embarked on an ambitious growth experiment across India by bundling free premium access into Airtel's mobile plans for roughly 360 million customers. Now, with the earliest cohorts of those free subscriptions expiring after their 12-month window, the company is seeing real signals that the strategy might actually translate downloads into revenue.

The scale of the giveaway#

Starting in July 2025, Perplexity and Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, offered a complimentary year of Perplexity Pro to eligible subscribers. The service normally costs around $200 annually. The promotional window remained open until mid-January 2026, and early users began hitting the expiration deadline last month, facing auto-renewal charges unless they manually opted out.

The immediate results proved striking. Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads across India in July 2025 alone—a staggering 625% month-on-month increase and more than the entire first half of the year combined. Downloads stayed elevated throughout the promotion period, reaching 56 million over seven months—nearly ten times the volume from the same stretch beforehand. Monthly active users climbed from a baseline of around 2.6 million to peak at 22 million by October.

Downloads fell but engagement remained#

Once new redemptions closed in January, momentum cooled dramatically. Sensor Tower estimates downloads plummeted by over 90% in the following six months, falling to just 3.3 million between February and July. Yet the user base proved stickier than the headline numbers suggested. Monthly active users in July still hovered near 14 million—down 37% from the October peak but still more than five times pre-promotion levels.

More intriguingly, the collapse in downloads did not coincide with a collapse in spending. Between February and August, in-app revenue climbed roughly 60% compared to the months when the offer was actively drawing new users. From mid-July through mid-August, daily revenue averaged 9% higher than the preceding month and 27% above the first half of 2026.

Signs of sustainable monetization#

The rising revenue suggests some users who experienced the service for free are now willing to pay—though the picture remains murky. The bundled subscriptions were set to auto-renew, meaning users who did not manually cancel before expiration could have become paying subscribers by inaction rather than choice. Sensor Tower cannot isolate whether revenue gains come from former Airtel users deliberately upgrading or from other audiences drawn by the promotion's visibility.