Your Free Perplexity Pro Year Is Running Out. Now What?
Airtel gave away a year of Perplexity Pro, and those free years are now ending with a charge on the card you added. Here's how to check your date, what you lose on the free plan, and what paying really costs from India.
In July 2025, Airtel handed its customers a free year of Perplexity Pro, a plan it valued at about ₹17,000. Millions said yes. To claim it, you had to add a credit card. Do the maths: anyone who activated in the first wave hit the end of that year in July, and the rest are reaching it month by month, right now.
This post is for the person who has been using it free for a year and is about to get a bill, or already has one.
Check your renewal date before anything else
The card you added during the Airtel signup is what Perplexity charges when the free year runs out. Cancelling is easy, but where you cancel depends on how you subscribed, and people miss this.
- Signed up on perplexity.ai: Settings, then Subscription, then Manage subscription. That opens the billing page where you can cancel.
- Through the Android app: Google Play, your profile, Payments and subscriptions, Subscriptions, then Perplexity.
- Through the iPhone app: iPhone Settings, your name, Subscriptions.
If you subscribed through an app store, the website won't show a cancel button at all. Cancelling keeps Pro active until the end of the period you already have, so there's no reason to wait until the last day.
The Airtel Pro wasn't quite the same as paid Pro
In May this year, Reddit filled up with Pro users saying they were hitting weekly caps on the advanced models after a handful of questions, and some reported reaching a weekly upload limit after just two files. Perplexity's explanation was that accounts tied to promotional codes can have different limits, and that it had tightened enforcement because codes were being resold.
That matters for two reasons. First, if Perplexity felt stingy over the past few months, you may have been judging a throttled version. Paid Pro is the fairer test. Second, those codes are still being sold. A quick search turns up "one-year Perplexity Pro" listings on Indian sites for ₹5,999. Those resold codes are exactly what Perplexity was cracking down on. Skip them.
What you actually lose on the free plan
Dropping to free doesn't lock you out. You still get Perplexity's core trick: a direct answer with the sources linked underneath, which is why it caught on in the first place.
What shrinks is the heavier stuff. The newest models, Deep Research (the long multi-step reports), larger file uploads and the model picker are capped tightly or kept for paid plans. Perplexity's own pricing page now only describes the free tier's allowance as limited weekly usage, without a number. So I can't promise you a count. If you mainly ask quick factual questions, you'll barely notice. If you were feeding it PDFs for assignments or client research every day, you will.
One habit to keep either way: click the sources. Perplexity is better than most chatbots at showing where an answer came from, but a cited link doesn't guarantee the link says what the summary claims.
Your three options, priced
- Go free: ₹0. My pick for most students and anyone who used Pro a few times a week.
- Pay for Pro: $20 a month, or about $17 a month on the yearly plan, billed in dollars plus 18% GST. Your bank will likely add a forex fee on top. Pay monthly for the first month, so you're judging the real limits before committing to a year.
- Use a different free offer: if you're on Jio with a 5G plan of ₹349 or more, the Google AI Pro offer in the MyJio app was still open at the end of September, for 18 months. You lose Perplexity's source-first style, but you get Gemini's top models. Check the terms before claiming, since you must keep that plan active.
Max, at $200 a month, is for people running research all day. If the upgrade prompt for Max shows up after a few questions on a promo account, read the section above before believing you've outgrown Pro.
AI data retention is on, even for paying users
Perplexity's setting called AI data retention is on by default for Free, Pro and Max. While it's on, your questions can be used to train its models. Turn it off under your account Settings, on the Preferences page.
Two catches. Switching it off only covers what you ask from that point onward, not your past year of searches. And only Enterprise plans never use your data for training. If you've been pasting client documents into a personal account, that's worth a second thought.
Keep the app, cancel the renewal
Perplexity earned its place as a research tool, and I'd keep it on the free plan rather than delete the app. Pay only if you can name the weekly task that needs Pro, like a literature review or a market scan, and pay monthly until you're sure. And cancel the renewal today if you haven't decided, because if you do nothing, the card on file gets charged.
Did your free year end with a surprise debit, or did you catch it in time?
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