India, the world’s second-largest smartphone market, has around 730 million devices in use. With one of the lowest mobile data costs globally—an average of 9.2 cents per gigabyte—Indians consume roughly 21 gigabytes of data per month, making the market particularly attractive for tech companies offering high-data services like AI.
Google kicked off the free-plan strategy in November, offering its $400 Gemini AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to 500 million customers of Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom operator. Last week, the company added India to dozens of countries receiving its heavily discounted "AI Plus" package.
OpenAI followed suit, making its ChatGPT Go plan—previously priced at $54 in India—free for a year. The plan offers extended, though not unlimited, usage compared to existing ChatGPT subscriptions. Like Google’s offer, the free plan is currently exclusive to India.
Perplexity also joined the fray, making its Pro plan, typically $200 annually, free for Airtel users in India, providing unlimited access to advanced research tools.
Early indicators suggest the strategy is working. Daily active users of ChatGPT in India jumped 607% year-on-year to 73 million last week, more than double the number in the United States, according to Sensor Tower data compiled for Reuters. Gemini saw daily users rise 15% to 17 million since the Reliance Jio offer launched in November, compared to 3 million in the U.S. Perplexity now derives over a third of its global daily active users from India, up from 7% last year.
Strategic Data Collection
While OpenAI framed the ChatGPT Go free plan as part of a "continued India-first commitment" aimed at making tools more accessible, analysts say the strategy also serves a broader purpose. India’s linguistic diversity offers a rich dataset for AI training, enabling models to learn complex communication patterns largely absent in existing datasets.
“Free plans fill gaps in AI training data sets that currently lack information on user behaviour patterns in the region,” said Sagar Vishnoi, co-founder of AI think tank Future Shift Labs.
India has a history of free or low-cost incentives driving mass adoption. Reliance Jio, for instance, gained more than 500 million users after offering free voice and data services at its 2016 launch. Similarly, streaming and media promotions in India have historically leveraged freebies to capture user attention.
User Experience and Concerns
Sensor Tower data indicates strong engagement with free AI plans in India: 46% of ChatGPT users opened the app daily in November, compared to 20% for Perplexity and 14% for Gemini. Anees Hassan, a PhD student in Hyderabad, spends about three hours daily using ChatGPT and Gemini to generate citations, refine writing, and create images.
However, users are also cautious about potential downsides. “I am concerned about data harvesting, so I have used the opt-out feature to stop sharing my data for AI training,” Hassan said, highlighting growing awareness about privacy risks amid the surge of free AI access.
The AI race in India underscores the country’s strategic importance to global tech companies—not just as a market for users, but as a critical source of linguistic and behavioral data that can shape the next generation of AI models.