Perplexity India users grow fivefold after Airtel free Pro year

A giveaway that worked, at least for user numbers

Perplexity's year-long promotion with Bharti Airtel in India now has measurable results, though they are uneven. Usage has held up well, while revenue has grown more slowly than the headlines imply. That gap matters for every AI company competing for India's huge but price-sensitive consumer market, including Anthropic, which has taken a very different route into the country.

The deal was announced in July 2025. It gave a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally worth about $200, to Airtel's 360 million customers. Airtel is India's second-largest telecom operator.22 The offer covered prepaid, postpaid, broadband and DTH customers, and people claimed it through the Airtel Thanks app.14 New redemptions stopped on January 16, 2026. Each subscriber kept Pro for a full year from the day they activated it.11 That means the earliest users began losing free access in July 2026, and they had to switch off auto-renewal if they did not want to be charged.22

Indian coverage at the time noted that this was the first time a telecom operator in the country had bundled a paid AI subscription. Until then, carriers had mostly bundled video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.16

The numbers: a spike, a collapse, and a higher baseline

The Sensor Tower estimates reported by TechCrunch are the most widely cited figures, and other outlets repeat them consistently. Perplexity had 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the month before.21 That one month beat the 5.4 million downloads the app had collected across the whole first half of 2025.26 Over the seven months the offer was open to new users, downloads reached about 56 million, more than nine times the previous seven-month period.22 Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and peaked at about 22 million in October.22

Appfigures data shows the same pattern. Average daily downloads rose from about 11,200 before the launch to nearly 223,000 in the promotion's first week, and reached about 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October.26

When the redemption window closed, new installs dropped sharply. Sensor Tower estimates 3.3 million downloads in India between February and July 2026, more than 90% below the previous six months.22 Users fell off much more slowly. Monthly actives were close to 14 million in July 2026. That is 37% below the October peak, but more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025.22 Sensor Tower analyst Abe Yousef called ongoing usage "resilient" and said Perplexity now has significantly more Indian users than it did before the promotion.21

Where the coverage splits: did anyone actually pay?

Most of the reporting agrees on the user figures. It disagrees on what the revenue figures mean.

Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity's in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India from February to mid-August was about 60% higher than while the Airtel offer was open to new users.22 As the first free years ran out, average daily in-app revenue from around July 18 to August 12 was 9% higher than the previous 30 days and 27% above the first-half 2026 average.22 Appfigures estimates monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and $156,000 in July 2026.26

Many outlets treated this as evidence that free trials turn into paying customers. More careful reports added caveats. The subscriptions renewed automatically, and Sensor Tower cannot tell whether the extra revenue came from people who chose to keep paying or people who forgot to cancel.26 An Appfigures analyst also warned against crediting all of the increase to the promotion, because the publicity may have brought in paying customers who never had the free plan.26

The most skeptical analysis looked at revenue per user. By its calculation, Perplexity earned about 1.31 US cents per Indian monthly active user in January 2025 and about 1.11 cents in July 2026.29 In other words, the user base grew roughly 5.4 times while revenue per user went down. The same analysis estimated about $878,000 in Indian mobile app revenue over the first seven months of 2026. That works out to roughly one payer for every 1,260 active users, far below the 2–3% conversion rates some commentators had suggested.29 These figures cover app-store revenue only. Web and enterprise income are not included, so the true picture may be somewhat better.29

Our reading is that the skeptics have the stronger case. A 60% revenue increase from a very small base is real, but it is still small, and the per-user figures show that Perplexity bought reach, not a paying audience. The deal did achieve its distribution goal. Fourteen million monthly users is a real asset. Post-offer downloads still average about 18,000 a day, above the pre-deal level of 11,200.29 What has not been shown is that Indian consumers will pay $200 a year for an AI search engine.

The card controversy and the auto-renewal question

The way the promotion changed over time also bears on the revenue debate. At launch, Indian outlets reported that no credit card or payment details were needed to claim the offer.16 In December 2025, users received emails telling them to add a debit or credit card to keep their free Pro access. Perplexity said the change was meant to protect the offer for legitimate users, and many users were unhappy about it.20 Perplexity's help center now says a credit card was required to redeem the offer and that nothing is charged during the promotional period.11 Some subscribers said their access was paused until they added a card.23

This matters for the conversion question. Once a card is on file and auto-renewal is on by default, some of the post-promotion revenue may come from inertia rather than choice. YourStory raised the same point, noting that Perplexity's terms allow automatic renewal unless users cancel.17 As more Airtel users reach the end of their free year over the coming months, chargebacks and cancellations will show how much of the revenue lasts.

The Anthropic angle: Claude inside the bundle, and Claude on its own

Anthropic connects to this story in two ways. First, Perplexity Pro's appeal rests partly on models built by other companies. Airtel promoted the bundle as giving access to GPT, Claude and Gemini models.12 News18 likewise listed Claude among the models available to Pro users.20 So millions of Indian Airtel customers could use Anthropic's models through Perplexity without ever subscribing to Claude directly.

Second, Anthropic's own India strategy looks very different from Perplexity's. When it announced its expansion, Anthropic said India ranked second in the world for consumer use of Claude, behind only the US, and that a large share of that use was for coding and technical work.1 It opened its Bengaluru office in February 2026, its second in Asia after Tokyo. It said its India run-rate revenue had doubled since the October 2025 announcement.4 Nearly half of Claude usage in India involves computer and mathematical tasks.4 Customers in production at launch included Air India, CRED and Cognizant.6 Anthropic has also partnered with Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, and hired former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead the business.3

Anthropic has gone with local pricing rather than giveaways. In July 2026 it began showing rupee prices in India, with Claude Pro at ₹2,000 a month on annual billing. TechCrunch reported that India accounts for 5.8% of global Claude usage.3 Appfigures data suggests Perplexity's surge did not pull users away from its rivals. ChatGPT and Claude downloads stayed broadly stable during Perplexity's peak period.26

Why it matters

Put side by side, the two companies show two ways to grow in India. Perplexity used a carrier partnership to reach a mass audience and now has to prove it can earn money from it. Anthropic built a smaller, mostly developer and enterprise base that appears to pay more per user, and it has added offices, partnerships and rupee pricing to keep it growing. Perplexity is not the only one using free access: Google and OpenAI offer their own free or low-cost plans for Gemini and ChatGPT Go in India.20 That makes it harder for any single giveaway to give a lasting edge.

The Airtel experiment has a clear start date and a hard cutoff, which makes it one of the cleanest real-world tests of whether free premium AI turns into paid premium AI in a price-sensitive market.29 So far, the result is that free access built a lasting habit for millions of users but has not yet produced a business at that scale. For Anthropic, the lesson runs the other way. Claude's Indian growth appears to rest on paying technical users rather than a subsidized mass audience. That may reach fewer people, but it is the more durable route to revenue.