Airtel's free year of Perplexity Pro ends, and the auto-renewal charges begin

Perplexity’s monthly mobile revenue in India was $156,000 in July 2026, compared to about $34,000 in January 2025.

Its free Pro subscriptions, distributed through telecom operator Airtel, had already begun to expire.

A $200 subscription, handed to 360 million customers

In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s second largest carrier, to provide a 12-month free trial of Perplexity Pro to its 360 million subscribers. The plan usually costs about $200 a year, or 17,000 rupees.

Perplexity was downloaded 5.9 million times in all of India in July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month and more installs in four weeks than the app had amassed during the entire first half of the year.

Daily downloads increased from around 11,200 in the week before the offer to ~223,000 in its first week, reaching ~305,000 a day by mid-October.

New users could get in on the deal for seven months. In that stretch, there were 56 million downloads, more than nine times the downloads in the prior stretch.

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