Perplexity's Airtel giveaway bought 56 million downloads. Now it has to bill them.

Perplexity spent a year handing Perplexity Pro to customers of Airtel, India's second-biggest telecom operator, and the earliest of those free twelve-month subscriptions have now run out ^[1][2]. That turns a distribution deal into the first large public test of whether a bundled AI subscription produces lasting users and revenue once the giveaway ends ^[3].

The top-of-funnel numbers were never in doubt. Perplexity recorded 5.9 million India downloads in July 2025, up 625% month over month, according to Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch ^[4]. That single month beat the 5.4 million downloads the app had accumulated across the entire first half of the year, by roughly 9% ^[5][3]. Over the seven months the offer stayed open to new redemptions, Perplexity logged 56 million India downloads, more than nine times the preceding seven-month stretch ^[6]. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and peaked at about 22 million in October ^[7].

That is what a carrier bundle buys: a free year of a service normally priced near $200, dangled at 360 million subscribers ^[1]. India is the obvious place to run the experiment, with more than a billion internet subscribers and over 700 million smartphone users, second only to China, and the same scale has consistently been harder to convert into revenue ^[14]. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have all been pushing India-specific low-cost plans, free access and distribution partnerships on the same logic ^[15].

The unwind was equally fast. New redemptions closed on January 16, and India downloads fell to 3.3 million between February and July, more than 90% below the preceding six months ^[2][8]. On a monthly basis that is roughly 8 million downloads a month during the offer against about 550,000 after, a factor of about 15 ^[1]. Usage held up better: monthly actives stood at nearly 14 million in July, down 37% from the October peak but more than five times the roughly 2.6 million Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025 ^[9]. Put differently, the surviving active base is about a quarter of the downloads pulled in during the offer window ^[2]. Sensor Tower senior insights analyst Abe Yousef told TechCrunch that while a time-limited promotion "would naturally lead to a decline in adoption after the offer period, ongoing usage has remained resilient" ^[10].

The money is the part worth watching, and here the picture is favourable but thin. Sensor Tower estimates India in-app purchase and subscription revenue between February and mid-August rose about 60% versus the period when the Airtel offer was live, even as downloads collapsed ^[11]. In the window from around July 18 to August 12, as the first cohort hit expiry, average daily in-app revenue ran 9% above the preceding 30 days and 27% above the first-half 2026 average ^[12].

Two caveats matter more than the percentages. The lifts are measured off a small base relative to 14 million monthly actives, and the free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so a user who did not cancel was charged by default rather than by decision ^[13]. Sensor Tower's own read is that the data does not confirm Airtel users are deliberately converting ^[13].

Watch the next two quarters of India in-app revenue as later Airtel cohorts, redeemed closer to the January 16 cutoff, roll off ^[2][11]. Watch whether monthly actives keep sliding from 14 million once billing starts biting ^[9]. And watch refund and cancellation behaviour, the tell for whether default-on renewal is producing customers or complaints ^[13].