The operation carried out with Airtel has caused downloads to explode and then the audience to fall, but Perplexity retains five times more active users than before the offer.
By July 2025 Perplexity had opened a year of Pro subscription — usually $200 — to the 360 million customers of the Indian operator Airtel. In the month of launch, the application recorded 5.9 million downloads, six times the volume of the previous month, and a total of 56 million over the seven months of the operation. New registrations were closed on 16 January 2026 and early subscribers began to lose access between July and August 2026.
The reflux exists but remains partial. Downloads fell to 3.3 million between February and July 2026, a 90% drop. The monthly active users, which rose to 22 million in October 2025, fell to nearly 14 million in July 2026 — a 37% decrease from the peak, but a level still five times higher than the pre-operation level.
On the income side, the trajectory is rising: monthly net mobile revenues increased from $34,000 in January 2025 to $156,000 in July 2026, and the first seven months of 2026 earned $878,000, or 16 per cent more than the total of 2025. Amounts that remain modest in view of the second world smartphone market, with its 700 million users, and that illustrate the persistent difficulty of monetizing mainstream AI in India.
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