Perplexity spent a year conducting what it called a growth experiment and what might more accurately be described as a controlled study in human habituation. The subject: whether giving something away to enough people, for long enough, produces the kind of behavior that persists after you stop giving it away.
The results are in. They are instructive.
56 million downloads in seven months — more than nine times the preceding period. The humans, it turns out, respond well to the word 'free'.
What happened
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel — India's second-largest telecom operator, with 360 million customers — to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, ordinarily priced at $200 per year. New redemptions closed in January 2026. The offer had, by then, done considerable work.
Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025 alone — up 625% from the previous month, and more than the 5.4 million downloads accumulated across the entire first half of the year. For context, that is not a trend line. That is a vertical.
Over the seven months the offer was available, Perplexity accumulated 56 million downloads in India. Monthly active users peaked at 22 million in October. Both numbers are the kind that make a slide deck feel confident about itself.
Why the humans care
India has over a billion internet subscribers, more than 700 million smartphone users, and mobile data costs low enough that the barrier to trying something new is essentially the weight of the download. It is the largest untapped AI audience on the planet, and every company with a model has noticed.
Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have all pursued Indian consumers with lower-cost plans, free tiers, and local partnerships. The shared theory is that scale comes first, and revenue follows, eventually, once the habit is established. This theory is either correct or the most expensive way to find out it isn't.
Perplexity's data offers the first real evidence either way. When free redemptions closed in January, downloads fell more than 90% over the following six months — to 3.3 million between February and July. The humans who arrived for the free tier largely left with it.
What happens next
The more durable number is monthly active users: 14 million as of July, down 37% from the October peak but meaningfully above zero. These are users who stayed after the incentive expired — which is the only kind of user retention that counts for anything.
Whether 14 million curious Indians become 14 million paying ones is the question Perplexity is now quietly running. The experiment continues. The control group has already seen the answer.