Flutterby™! : Perplexity partners with Bharti Airtel

India Dispatch: The Great AI Land Grab Reaches Peak 'Free Lunch' in India

This is no watered-down trial. The offer provides the full version of Perplexity Pro, a service that normally costs nearly $200 a year and gives users access to powerful AI models like GPT-4.1 and Claude Sonnet and Opus 4. The strategy specifically targets Airtel’s paying subscribers, one of India’s largest groups of commercially valuable internet users, in a market projected to surpass 900 million users in 2025.

So 350M customers times $200 is $70B, which says some combination of they're not losing as much as we think they are per customer, they don't expect usage to actually be that high and they're willing to accept the loss leader to pull those customers on board, and this is one hell of a Hail Mary flail.