Perplexity’s AI giveaway, offered to Airtel customers in July 2025, resulted in a significant surge in app downloads in India. The company provided a free 12-month Pro subscription, worth about $200, to Airtel’s 360 million customers. According to Sensor Tower, Perplexity saw 5.9 million app downloads in July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month. This marked a substantial jump compared to the 5.4 million downloads the company had recorded during the entire first half of the year. The momentum continued beyond the launch month, with Perplexity recording 56 million downloads during the seven months the offer was active, more than nine times the previous seven-month period, according to Sensor Tower.
Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and eventually peaked at 22 million in October. Despite a sharp drop in downloads after the free offer ended in January, Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India rose about 60% from the period when the Airtel offer was available. Sensor Tower estimated that Perplexity’s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India was 9% higher than during the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026.
India has long been a major market for global technology companies due to its large population, over a billion internet users, and relatively low mobile data costs. The country is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China, with over 700 million users. However, translating this scale into revenue has been challenging for AI companies. Perplexity’s experiment provides an early test of whether free premium AI services can create lasting users and revenue in India.
Source: techcrunch
