Over roughly twelve months, three of the world's biggest AI companies each decided the fastest way to win India was to stop charging for their premium product entirely. Perplexity partnered with Airtel in July 2025 to give 360 million subscribers a free year of Perplexity Pro, normally worth about $200. OpenAI followed in November, making ChatGPT Go — its ₹399-a-month tier — free for a full year to every user in India, no telecom partner required. Google closed the trio the same month, teaming with Reliance Jio to hand eligible users 18 months of Gemini's ₹35,100-a-year AI Pro plan, complete with 2TB of storage and the company's video and image tools.
All three bets rest on the same wager: that giving away a product this expensive to build will convert enough of India's smartphone base into paying, habituated users to be worth the cost. It's an enormous, unproven assumption, made three times over by companies that don't normally throw away nine-figure subscription value on a hunch. And until recently, nobody had any real evidence either way — because none of these offers had actually run their course.
The one deal with a completed cycle
Perplexity's Airtel offer is the exception, and that makes it the closest thing this fight has to a control group. New signups closed in January 2026, six months after launch. What happened before and after that cutoff is now on the record, via data reported by Sensor Tower.
The download numbers moved the way you'd expect from a genuinely free premium product handed to 360 million people. Perplexity was averaging about 11,200 downloads a day in India the week before the offer launched. In the first week after, that jumped twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day, and kept climbing to a peak of roughly 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October 2025. Sensor Tower estimates 56 million total downloads in India across the seven months the offer stayed open.
Then the free signups stopped, and the numbers did what free-acquisition numbers usually do when the free part ends: they fell hard. Monthly active users in India stood near 14 million in July 2026 — down 37% from the October 2025 peak.
Here's the part that doesn't fit the usual pattern. Revenue didn't fall with it. Perplexity's monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025, before the deal existed, to $70,000 in December 2025, while the offer was still open — and to $156,000 by July 2026, after new signups had stopped and downloads had cratered. Sensor Tower's estimate for the February-through-mid-August period puts in-app purchase and subscription revenue about 60% higher than during the window when the free offer was still open to new users.
What that combination actually means
A 90% collapse in daily downloads next to rising revenue only makes sense one way: the users who left were the ones who were never going to pay, and the users who stayed are converting at a rate strong enough to outweigh the ones who churned. Fourteen million monthly active users is still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million Perplexity averaged in India before the Airtel deal existed at all. The free year didn't just generate a download spike that evaporated — it left behind a user base multiple times larger than what came before, and that base is now spending more with the company than it was during the promotion itself.
That's a real signal, not proof of a working business model. $156,000 a month is a rounding error against the billions Perplexity has raised, and converting a sliver of 56 million freebie downloads into a durable, growing subscriber base over several more years is a very different challenge than converting the first wave. But it's the first data India's AI freebie war has produced, and directionally, it says the bet can work.
The other two clocks are still running
| Partner | Offer | Start | Free window | Status as of Aug 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | Airtel | 12-month Pro (~$200 value) | July 2025 | Closed Jan 2026 | Complete — revenue data exists |
| OpenAI | None (all India) | 12-month ChatGPT Go (₹399/mo value) | Nov 2025 | Runs to ~Nov 2026 | Still open |
| Reliance Jio | 18-month AI Pro (₹35,100 value) | Nov 2025 | Runs to ~mid-2027 | Still open |
OpenAI's free year in India runs out around November 2026 — roughly ten weeks from now. The company has already flagged the underlying appetite: it said paid ChatGPT Go subscriptions in India doubled within a month of the tier's original paid launch, which is part of why it moved to giving the whole country a free year rather than just discounting it further. Google's Jio partnership has the longest runway of the three, with the free window not closing until well into 2027, and a narrower initial eligibility band — Jio 5G users aged 18–25 on plans of ₹349 or more — before wider rollout.
Neither company has anything like Perplexity's post-cutoff numbers yet, because neither cutoff has arrived. When OpenAI's does, in a market where it has already reported strong organic paid demand, it will be the second real test of whether flooding India with free AI access converts into a business — and the first one where the free tier wasn't tied to a single telecom's subscriber base, but to the entire country at once. Perplexity spent $200 per free user to find out its bet mostly worked at a scale of tens of millions. OpenAI is about to find out whether the same trade holds at the scale of a whole population's ChatGPT habit.
