Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has conducted a highly anticipated scaling growth experiment in the global AI industry over the past year. In July 2025, Perplexity made a major partnership with Airtel, India's second-largest telecommunications operator, offering up to 360 million mobile users a free 12-month Perplexity Pro premium subscription worth approximately $200. As this one-year free benefit began to expire last month, the early user subscription situation emerged, providing a crucial observational window for the industry challenge of whether "AI services can achieve long-term user conversion and stable revenue through free bundling."

This free promotional campaign triggered an explosive download surge in the Indian market. According to data from application intelligence firm Sensor Tower, in the month of July 2025 when the collaboration was launched, Perplexity's app downloads in India surged to 5.9 million, a 625% increase compared to the previous month, with monthly downloads even exceeding the total of the first half of the year. The channel for new users to participate in this offer officially closed on January 16, 2026, but during the seven-month period of open access for new users, Perplexity's total downloads in India jumped to 5.6 million, more than nine times higher than the previous seven months. Its monthly active users also rose from 8.9 million to a peak of 22 million in October.

India, with its large population base, over 1 billion internet users, and relatively low mobile data costs, has always been a key market for global tech giants, but it is also one of the hardest markets globally to monetize generative AI due to difficulties in cultivating payment habits. Therefore, giants such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have recently introduced low-cost plans, free trials, or carrier-bundled partnerships targeted at the Indian market to capture the massive user base. Although Perplexity's app downloads in India dropped by more than 90% between February and July this year after the free redemption window closed in January, recording only about 3.3 million downloads, the user base accumulated earlier did not easily disappear.

From the perspective of user retention and actual revenue performance, Perplexity's bold experiment showed unexpected resilience. Sensor Tower data shows that although downloads dropped significantly, Perplexity's monthly active users in India remained around 14 million in July, although slightly lower than the peak, it was still more than five times the average level in the first half of 2025. More astonishingly, in-app purchases and subscription revenue did not decline along with the drop in downloads, but instead increased against the trend. Between February and mid-August this year, its in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India increased by about 60% compared to the promotional period. Especially between July 18 and August 12, due to the first batch of Airtel users facing the choice of free expiration and automatic renewal, Perplexity's daily in-app purchase revenue actually increased by 9% compared to the previous 30 days, and by 27% compared to the average level in the first half of 2026.

Data from another application intelligence company, Appfigures, also confirmed this trend. The firm pointed out that Perplexity's explosive growth in India was not a reflection of the general AI trend across the industry, as the downloads of ChatGPT by OpenAI and Claude by Anthropic remained relatively stable during the same period, which was entirely a unique benefit brought by Perplexity's Airtel bundling strategy. According to Appfigures' statistics, Perplexity's net mobile app monthly revenue in India increased from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $156,000 in July 2026, with total revenue in India reaching $878,000 in the first seven months of 2026, a 16% increase compared to the entire year of 2025.

However, industry analysts also warned that these revenue increases cannot be simply attributed to the active payment conversion of former Airtel free users. On one hand, due to the default activation of auto-renewal in the promotion rules, some revenue may come from users who failed to cancel their subscriptions before expiration. On the other hand, the huge brand exposure brought by the carrier partnership also attracted a large number of new paying users who had never participated in the free activity. Additionally, after Perplexity's successful trial, OpenAI also launched a one-year ChatGPT Go free plan in August 2025, and Google subsequently offered a 18-month free AI Pro subscription to Reliance Jio users, making Perplexity the first to face the test of turning "free pies into paid bills."

As subsequent batches of Indian users approach the expiration dates of their free subscriptions, whether these price-sensitive users will choose to pay generously or collectively leave remains to be seen in the coming months. This AI free advantage and commercialization conversion competition initiated by Perplexity in India will provide a significant industry report for the implementation of the generative AI industry in developing countries.