Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered answer engine Perplexity plans to roll out a lower India-specific pricing for its premium subscription tier, Perplexity Pro, co-founder Aravind Srinivas said on April 9, as the startup looks to grow its subscriber base in the world's second largest internet market.
"We are definitely thinking about it. I think that's the right strategy. Many other consumer subscription apps like Netflix and Amazon have done it. So, that's definitely the way to go," Srinivas said during a virtual interaction at the News18 Rising Bharat Summit 2025.
"Obviously, our inference is expensive. We don't want to put a lower-tier quality product just for saving costs there. So, we are trying to figure out a way to distil some of the open source models and make it more efficient."
While Srinivas didn't share details, he said the company is thinking about what should be the lower and higher tier plans.
Perplexity charges $20 (Rs 1,731) a month for its premium subscription service across most of the world, including India.
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"India is in the top 10 countries for us right now, probably even close to the top five in terms of revenue already" he said.
Srinivas said he was pleasantly surprised by the willingness of people in India to pay for the product despite an expensive price point.
"A lot of people are using the deep research agent that we have, our pro search is being used by a lot of people too. In terms of daily query traffic too, it (India) is in the top five or top four (market) for us. So, it's a pretty important market" he said.
Last year, Meta CFO Susan Li said India was the biggest market in terms of usage for its AI assistant Meta AI. Earlier this month, OpenAI also said India was the fastest growing market for its AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Local content push
Perplexity, which seeks to disrupt Google's flagship search engine, is also focusing on incorporating local content to attract more people to its answer engine.
In recent weeks, it has been offering cricket content such as live scores, game summaries, and upcoming fixtures.
In March, it launched a dedicated IPL page where users can track league standings, match schedules, and the latest news.
"There are lots of searches on cricket that are already happening with Perplexity, and we want to keep growing that. We also plan to incorporate other content that's interesting to Indian audiences like entertainment, TV shows, movies, local results, and better support for local language content" Srinivas said.
Founded in 2022 by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity was last valued at $9 billion when it raised $500 million funding led by Institutional Venture Partners.
The startup, which counts Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its backers, is said to be in talks to double its valuation to $18 billion.
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