A Free Year of AI: Does Anyone Actually Stay and Pay? Perplexity's India Experiment, First Results (2026)

The most common AI promotion right now isn’t a discount — it’s a whole year for free: bundled by a telco, granted by student status, thrown in with a credit card. We’ve covered one ourselves: Google AI Plus free for a year for students.

What’s always been missing is the follow-up. When the free year ends, how many people actually stay and pay?

On 18 August 2026, TechCrunch reporter Jagmeet Singh published the first scorecard from the largest “free year” experiment anyone has run. Here are the numbers — plus the one grey area in that scorecard that you personally should be guarding against.

The scale of the experiment

In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second-biggest telecom operator, to give 360 million customers a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally worth about US$200.

That US$200 lines up with our own verification data: Perplexity Pro lists at US$20/month, or US$200 annually (about US$16.67–17/month). A full year of the flagship plan, at zero.

New redemptions closed on 16 January 2026. But because each subscriber’s year ran from their own activation date, the earliest users only started hitting expiry in July 2026 — which is why there are finally numbers to read.

During the free period: a different company entirely

All figures below come from the two app-analytics firms cited in the TechCrunch report, Sensor Tower and Appfigures:

Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli ran an important control: “I compared Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to ensure it wasn’t more appetite for AI, and it wasn’t.” ChatGPT and Claude downloads stayed broadly flat. The spike belonged to Perplexity — and to that free voucher.

After expiry: three numbers pointing three different ways

Downloads: collapsed. Once the redemption window shut in January 2026, India downloads between February and July came to just 3.3 million — down more than 90% from the preceding six months.

Monthly actives: down 37%, but nowhere near baseline. From the October peak of about 22 million to nearly 14 million in July 2026 — 37% off the high, but still more than five times the ~2.6 million monthly average before the promo. Sensor Tower senior insights analyst Abe Yousef: a decline after a time-limited promotion is natural, but “ongoing usage has remained resilient,” and Perplexity has “significantly more users” in India than in the six months before.

Revenue: went up, not down. The counter-intuitive part:

• February to mid-August 2026, Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India was about 60% higher than during the promo window — downloads down 90%, money up.
• Closer to the expiry moment: between 18 July and 12 August (exactly when the earliest cohort came up for renewal), average daily IAP revenue was 9% higher than the prior 30 days and 27% above the H1 2026 average.
• Appfigures’ longer line: monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from ~US$34,000 in January 2025, to US$70,000 in December, to US$156,000 in July 2026. India generated an estimated US$878,000 in the first seven months of 2026 — 16% more than all of 2025.

The grey area nobody can resolve

The report brakes hard exactly where the numbers look best, and this is the part worth translating for everyone.

Those free subscriptions were set to auto-renew. Anyone who didn’t want to keep paying had to cancel before the renewal date.

So the revenue bump could be two completely different things:

1. People who used it free for a year, got hooked, and willingly paid; or
2. People who simply forgot to cancel and got charged.

TechCrunch is blunt about it: Sensor Tower cannot distinguish between those scenarios, nor separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers. Michaeli likewise cautioned against attributing all the growth to Airtel users converting — the sheer visibility of the promotion may have pulled in paying users who were never part of the giveaway at all.

In short: the scorecard proves a free year retains users. It does not yet prove the retained users are paying on purpose. The real answer arrives as later Airtel cohorts hit their renewal dates. Perplexity did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Why this matters outside India

Because this is now the standard play of the current AI land grab. In India alone, per the same report:

• August 2025: OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go free for a year in India (what Go actually includes: our ChatGPT Go limits breakdown).
• Google followed, offering AI Pro free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users.

You’ve seen the local version: telecom plans bundling AI subscriptions, credit-card perks throwing in six months, student status granting a year. The business model is identical to Airtel’s: get you habituated, then let auto-renew take over.

And “auto-charge at expiry” isn’t India-specific. When we verified Google’s student offer, the official terms said so in plain language: on the day the offer period ends, the system automatically charges your payment method the standard monthly price for your country, monthly, until you cancel (last checked 2026-08-22).

A checklist for claiming a free year

Not “don’t claim it” — a free year is a real benefit. Just don’t let forgetting make the decision for you:

1. Record the expiry date the moment you claim. Most offers run from activation, not from the announcement. Set a calendar reminder for 7 days before.
2. Check the payment method attached right away. Some offers require a card up front — which means expiry means charge.
3. Decide a week early, not on the day. Once the renewal date passes, most platforms won’t refund.
4. Cancelling doesn’t cut you off immediately. You normally keep access until the free period ends, so cancelling early costs you nothing.
5. Know what dropping back to free actually feels like. For Perplexity, our verification data shows the free tier gives unlimited basic search, but only about 3 Pro searches and about 5 Deep Research runs per day (checked 2026-07-25; Perplexity’s site returns 403 to automated queries, so this is cross-referenced second-hand sourcing and is flagged for re-verification). After a year on Pro, that gap is noticeable. On Google AI Plus it’s more concrete: storage drops from 400 GB back to 15 GB, and over-quota means deleting files.
6. If you do want to stay, price-check once before renewing. Renewal is at standard monthly rates, but annual, student, and education pricing are often cheaper for the same service.

Bottom line

Giving away a free year of AI does retain users at scale — Perplexity’s monthly actives in India are still over five times pre-promo levels, and that number is solid.

But no analytics firm can currently separate willing renewals from forgotten cancellations inside that revenue growth. Until that answer exists, there’s one thing to do: put your own expiry date in the calendar.

Sourcing: TechCrunch, “Perplexity’s free AI offer left it with millions more users in India” (Jagmeet Singh, 2026-08-18). All figures are estimates from the third-party app-analytics firms cited in that report (Sensor Tower, Appfigures) — not Perplexity official financials. Perplexity did not respond to that report’s request for comment. We relay this information only; it does not represent our own position, and official announcements take precedence.

Our own price and free-tier verification: Perplexity tool page, full Perplexity plan breakdown.

Original report: TechCrunch | Official site: Perplexity