Perplexity gave $200 subscriptions to 360m Indians and now bills $156,000 a month

Perplexity's free year of Pro for Bharti Airtel customers has begun expiring, and the far side of the funnel is finally measurable: mobile revenue in India of $156,000 in July 2026, after a giveaway that put a roughly $200-a-year product in front of 360 million subscribers and drew 56 million downloads ^[1][2][3][4]. That is the clearest public answer yet to the carrier-bundling question. Free distribution at national scale bought users. It did not buy revenue.

The acquisition half worked almost embarrassingly well. Perplexity was installed 5.9 million times across India in July 2025, up 625% month on month and more than the app had managed in the entire first half of the year ^[5]. Daily downloads went from about 11,200 in the week before the offer to roughly 223,000 in its first week and about 305,000 a day by mid-October, a rise of roughly 27 times ^[6][1]. Monthly actives doubled to 8.9 million and peaked near 22 million in October ^[7].

Then Airtel closed new redemptions on January 16, 2026, and India recorded 3.3 million installs from February to July, a drop of more than 90% ^[8]. That is an average of about 550,000 installs a month against roughly 8 million a month during the seven-month redemption window ^[2]. Usage held better than installs: about 14 million monthly actives in July, down 37% from the October peak but more than five times the 2.6 million average of early 2025 ^[9]. "Ongoing usage has remained resilient," Sensor Tower senior insights analyst Abe Yousef told Cryptopolitan, which reported the figures ^[10].

Resilient usage is not revenue. At $156,000 a month across roughly 14 million monthly actives, Perplexity is earning about 1.1 cents per active user per month in its second-largest smartphone market ^[3][11]. Annualised, that run rate is about $1.87 million, or the equivalent of roughly 9,400 full-price Pro subscriptions out of 360 million eligible people, about 0.003% of the base ^[4][5][6]. The trajectory is real but small: revenue was around $34,000 a month in January 2025, so this is a 4.6x increase off a tiny number ^[12][7]. Cryptopolitan puts January-to-July 2026 India revenue at an estimated $878,000, 16% above the full year of 2025, which implies 2025 totalled about $757,000 ^[13][8].

The mechanics of conversion are where this gets uncomfortable. In February, Airtel and Perplexity made adding a credit or debit card mandatory to continue the free trial; the companies say cards are used only for verification and that users can cancel before renewal ^[14][15]. Subscribers told Cryptopolitan the original pitch asked for no payment details, and several said access was paused until they entered a card ^[16]. Auto-renewal was on by default, and from July 18 to August 12, as the first cohort's free year ran out, daily in-app purchase revenue averaged 9% above the prior 30 days and 27% above the 2026 average ^[17][18]. A 9% lift is what forced default conversion looks like when the base is this large.

Watch the monthly expiry cohorts through mid-2027: each one is a discrete test of whether that 9% bump compounds or decays. Watch the 14 million monthly actives for post-charge churn. And watch Google, which has agreed to give eligible Reliance Jio users 18 months of AI Pro free, and OpenAI, whose free ChatGPT Go year from August 2025 preceded India becoming its second-biggest market ^[19][20].