Perplexity has picked up millions of new users in India after giving away access to its AI answer engine at no cost, turning the country into the company's largest market by user count outside the United States. According to TechCrunch, the jump is the direct result of Perplexity's free-access push in India rather than organic product-market fit alone.
The pattern is not new for the region. India's mobile and AI markets have already shown that price, not polish, decides which product gets installed on hundreds of millions of phones. Google offered free Gemini access bundled with Reliance Jio plans; Perplexity has leaned on a similar playbook, most visibly through its deal with telecom carrier Bharti Airtel, which gave Airtel's subscriber base free access to Perplexity Pro. That bundling channel, rather than paid marketing or brand pull, is most likely -- in our estimation -- what is driving the bulk of the reported growth.
Why India is the testing ground for free AI
India is the world's largest population without a dominant paid-subscription habit for software. That makes it an unusually clean laboratory for a question every AI company is asking: does giving the product away for free build a user base worth having? Three features of the market make it attractive for this experiment:
- Massive scale: a single telecom bundling deal can reach hundreds of millions of subscribers overnight.
- Low willingness to pay for software subscriptions relative to US or European markets, making free distribution the only realistic path to volume.
- Fierce competition among AI providers -- Google, OpenAI and Perplexity have all pursued free or discounted access in India within the same period, according to public reporting.
For Perplexity specifically, the reported user growth suggests the free offer worked exactly as designed: it moved the needle on adoption in a market its rivals are also fighting over.
Users are not revenue
The harder question TechCrunch's report raises is what those millions of new users are actually worth. A free user in a market with low average revenue per user tells a very different story than a paying subscriber in the US or Europe. Companies chasing global user counts as a headline metric -- something Perplexity, OpenAI and Google all do in public statements -- need that number to eventually convert into either subscription revenue, advertising revenue, or enterprise/API usage. None of those conversion paths are guaranteed simply because the top-line user count went up.
This is the same tension SaaS companies have wrestled with in India for over a decade: distribution is solvable with subsidies, monetization is not. A free-tier user in India who never upgrades and never sees ads is a cost center, not an asset, unless the company has another way to extract value from that relationship -- training data, market share signaling to investors, or a future paid upsell.
What this means for AI builders
For teams building or investing in AI products, the Perplexity-in-India case is a useful data point rather than a template to copy blindly:
- Telecom and carrier bundling is a legitimate distribution channel for AI products in price-sensitive markets, but it front-loads user count while pushing the monetization problem downstream.
- User growth numbers announced without revenue or retention context should be read skeptically -- ask what percentage of new users are on a free tier tied to a specific bundling deal.
- Markets like India reward the company that can offer scale cheaply; that favors well-capitalized players who can subsidize access, which raises the bar for smaller AI startups trying to compete on distribution rather than product.
AiiN's takeaway
Perplexity's India numbers are a genuine win on the metric the company chose to optimize for: reach. Whether that reach becomes a durable business is a separate question the current report does not answer, and one that will matter more once the free-access deals underlying this growth start expiring or requiring renewal. For now, the lesson for anyone building AI products is to treat "millions of new users" as the opening line of a story, not the conclusion.