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.

Monthly active users doubled to 8.9 million and peaked at nearly 22 million in October.

Airtel stopped new redemptions on January 16, 2026. India saw 3.3 million installs between February and July, a decline of more than 90% from the previous six months.

From February to mid-August, Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India was about 60% higher than during the giveaway window.

India’s revenue for the first seven months of 2026 was estimated at $878,000, 16% above its total for all of 2025.

Monthly actives were close to 14 million in July, down 37% from their October peak but still more than five times the 2.6 million Perplexity averaged in early 2025.

“Ongoing usage has remained resilient,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, said.

Users say the ‘free’ plan asked for card details

The earliest Airtel customers activated their year of Pro last summer, so their free access began running out in July 2026, with auto-renewal enabled by default. People who did not cancel before the renewal date were charged.

From July 18 through August 12, when those first subscriptions expired, daily in-app purchase revenue averaged 9% above the prior 30 days and 27% above the 2026 average.

In February, Airtel and Perplexity made it mandatory for users to add a credit or debit card to continue the free trial.

The companies say the cards are only used for verification, nothing is charged during the free period, and users can cancel before any paid renewal.

Subscribers said the original pitch was as a perk, with no payment details asked for. Several said their access was paused until they input a card.

The change disrupted the work of students, freelancers, and small business owners who had integrated the tool into their daily research and writing.

On X, some said the two companies were using forgotten cancellation dates to turn trials into charges. “At least 50% will forget their trial end date and get charged,” one user wrote on January 15.

India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market with 700 million users, and low data costs and an internet base of over a billion people.

OpenAI offered free access to its low-cost ChatGPT Go plan in India for a year in August 2025, as reported by Cryptopolitan, and eventually turned India into its second biggest market.

Google has struck a deal to offer eligible Reliance Jio users 18 months of its AI Pro subscription for free.

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