India has become the center of a growing battle among global AI companies as they roll out free plans to attract users and collect valuable training data.
OpenAI, Google and Perplexity are offering free or heavily discounted AI subscriptions in India, a move widely seen as an effort to tap into the country’s massive and diverse user base. India is the world’s 2nd largest smartphone market with about 730 million devices. Users consume an average of 21 GB of mobile data each month, paying just USD 0.092 per GB, among the lowest rates globally.
To attract price sensitive users, Google began offering its USD 400 Gemini AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to around 500 million Reliance Jio customers in November. It has also added India to the list of countries where its discounted AI Plus package is available.
OpenAI has taken a similar step by making its ChatGPT Go plan free for 1 year in India. The plan was earlier priced at USD 54 in the country and is paid in over 100 markets. Like Google’s offer, this free access is limited to India.
Early data shows a sharp rise in usage. Daily active users of ChatGPT in India jumped 607 percent year on year to 73 million last week, more than double the figure in the US, according to data from a market intelligence firm. Gemini’s daily users in India rose 15 percent after the Reliance Jio offer to reach 17 million, compared to 3 million in the US.
Perplexity has also joined the push by offering its Pro plan, priced at USD 200 a year globally, free for 1 year to Airtel users. India now accounts for over 33 percent of Perplexity’s daily active users, up from 7 percent last year.
OpenAI’s India executive Pragya Misra said the free ChatGPT Go plan reflects the company’s “continued India-first commitment” to make AI tools more accessible.
AI analysts say these offers also help companies gather multilingual and mixed language data. Such data helps improve AI systems by testing them on complex communication patterns not widely available elsewhere.
Free digital services have worked well in India before. Reliance gained over 500 million telecom users after offering free data in 2016. Still, some users remain cautious. One student from Hyderabad said, “I am concerned about data harvesting, so I have used the opt-out feature to stop sharing my data for AI training.”
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