Industry 2026-08-19

Perplexity gave 360 million Indians a year of its $200 product. It now makes $156,000 a month there.

In July 2025 Perplexity gave every subscriber of Airtel, India's second-largest mobile operator, a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription — a product that normally costs about $200 a year, offered to a base of 360 million people. As a distribution exercise it worked: 5.9 million downloads in July 2025 alone, a 625 percent jump on the month before, and 56 million across the seven months the offer stayed open. Airtel closed new redemptions on 16 January 2026 and installs fell by more than 90 percent, but the users largely stayed. Monthly active users peaked at 22 million in October 2025 and stood at about 14 million in July 2026 — down 37 percent from the peak, still roughly five times the pre-deal level. The money is the smaller number. Appfigures puts monthly net mobile revenue in India at about $34,000 in January 2025 and $156,000 in July 2026, with $878,000 booked in the first seven months of 2026 — 16 percent above the whole of 2025. Sensor Tower estimates the increase since the offer closed to new users at about 60 percent. One thing the data cannot settle: how much of that is people choosing to pay, and how much is people who did not cancel before the renewal charged them.

Why it mattersThis is the clearest public read yet on whether giving AI away builds a business. It bought reach — 14 million monthly users in the market almost every AI company names as its most important — at a cost Perplexity has not disclosed and which Airtel largely absorbed in distribution. It has not yet bought much revenue: $156,000 a month across 14 million users is about a hundredth of a dollar per user per month. If you are one of those users, the date worth checking is your renewal date. If you run an AI company, the number to sit with is that a free year of a frontier product, in a market of 1.4 billion people, converts at a rate that still rounds close to zero.

✓ Verified · 3 sources

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Perplexity gave 360 million Indians a year of its $200 product. It now makes $156,000 a month there.

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