Perplexity’s partnership with Indian telecom operator Airtel delivered the kind of user growth most AI companies can only buy at enormous cost. The July 2025 promotion offered 360 million Airtel customers 12 months of Perplexity Pro, normally priced at about $200, without charge. Claims closed on January 16, leaving the company with a much larger audience and an unresolved question: how many free users will become paying customers?
The available mobile data shows a dramatic acquisition campaign. It does not yet show a completed subscription business. Later cohorts are still within their free year, and Perplexity did not comment on the results.
A distribution deal transformed Perplexity’s footprint
Sensor Tower estimated that Perplexity recorded 5.9 million downloads in India during July 2025, a 625% increase from the preceding month. That single month exceeded the 5.4 million downloads recorded during the entire first half of the year. Across the seven months in which customers could claim the offer, downloads reached 56 million, more than nine times the preceding period.
Monthly active users rose from 8.9 million in July 2025 to a peak of 22 million in October. By July 2026, the figure had settled at nearly 14 million. The decline from the peak is substantial, but the remaining audience is still far larger than before the Airtel promotion.
Appfigures recorded a similar surge. Daily downloads climbed from roughly 11,200 before launch to 223,000 during launch week, then reached about 305,000 between mid-September and mid-October. TechCrunch notes that downloads for ChatGPT and Claude remained comparatively stable during that period, suggesting the campaign created additional demand for Perplexity rather than merely reflecting a market-wide spike.
Revenue is rising, but conversion remains hard to read
After the claim window closed, Indian downloads fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimated 3.3 million downloads between February and July 2026, down more than 90% from the prior six months. That is an expected direction after a large free promotion ends, but the scale of the drop shows how heavily acquisition depended on Airtel’s distribution.
Spending offers a more encouraging signal. From February to mid-August, Sensor Tower estimated that consumer spending was 60% higher than during the promotional period. Average daily in-app purchase revenue between July 18 and August 12 was 9% above the preceding 30 days and 27% higher than the first-half average.
Appfigures estimated net mobile revenue rising from $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and $156,000 in July 2026. It put revenue for the first seven months of 2026 at about $878,000, 16% more than the whole of 2025. These estimates exclude important parts of the business and are not company-reported financial results.
Retention will decide whether free scale becomes a business
Neither dataset establishes how many Airtel users deliberately converted to paid subscriptions. Automatic renewal could also produce accidental payments, and many later recipients have not yet reached the end of their free year. The strongest conversion test is therefore still ahead.
The promotion nevertheless demonstrates the power of bundling AI with a mass-market service. Perplexity gained distribution, habit formation and brand visibility across one of the world’s largest mobile markets. Airtel gave customers a high-value benefit without asking them to choose and pay for a new service on day one.
The commercial outcome will depend on what happens when convenience turns into a bill. A stable core of nearly 14 million monthly active users and rising estimated spending provide evidence of continued interest. The collapse in downloads and uncertainty around voluntary conversion impose an equally important limit on the story.
Perplexity has already proved that a telecom partnership can manufacture reach. It has not yet proved that the resulting audience values the product enough to sustain the economics after the subsidy disappears.
