India is now the testbed for the generative AI bots and tools. Although AI bots and tools have been around for a while, it all began with the landmark deal between Aravind Srinivas’ Perplexity and Bharti Airtel to extend the benefits of the Perplexity Pro annual subscription for free to all Airtel customers. Ever since then, it was known that Indian consumers would be gifted a taste of a free trial of premium AI subscriptions in one way or the other.
With Airtel securing Perplexity, it was a matter of time until anyone expected a collaboration between ChatGPT and Reliance Jio for extending a similar benefit. However, the tables turned drastically. Jio did come up with a free subscription to an AI plan, but ChatGPT wasn’t in the mix – it was Google’s premium subscription of Gemini. OpenAI, on the other hand, played on its own with free access to its most affordable premium plan.
If you are someone who is willing to try out any of these free trials to paid AI subscriptions, which of these should you choose? Which free subscription offers the best value?
Google AI Pro
Offer: Free for 18 months with Jio
Jio’s Google AI Pro subscription offer seems to be the most ecosystem-integrated of the lot. The free subscription provides extended access to the powerful Gemini 2.5 Pro model with more tokens to generate content. You get:
– significantly higher limits for image generation using the Gemini 2.5 Flash Nano Banana model.
– access to the Veo 3.1 Flash model for video generation, which is considered a top contender in the industry.
– a substantial 2TB of integrated storage across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.
– deep integration of Gemini AI across Google’s apps like Gmail and Docs, offering 20 times more access to Gemini 2.5 Pro and 50 times more access to the Deep Research tool than the standard free tier.
Jio is presently extending the offer to users under 25 years of age with an active unlimited 5G plan, with the promise of extending to other users in the months to come.
Perplexity AI Pro
Offer: Free for 1 year with Airtel
Perplexity’s Pro offer stands out as the ultimate choice for the ‘AI enthusiast’ who demands flexibility and choice. Available to all Airtel users for free, there are no terms and conditions to activate the offer. The offer gives access to Perplexity Pro subscription for a whole year, complete with cutting-edge foundational models, including:
– Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro
– OpenAI’s GPT-5
– Anthropic’s Claude 4.5
The Pro plan also unlocks certain paid features within its Comet browser.
ChatGPT Go
Offer: Free for 1 year for all users in India
OpenAI hasn’t partnered with any local operator but is extending the ChatGPT Go subscription for free to new and existing users signing up. ChatGPT Go, which costs Rs 399 per month, will be offered for free for a limited time to all users. Compared to the free model, ChatGPT Go has a 10x higher limit on image generation, along with access to its AI models. In terms of overall feature set, especially when compared to its competitors, ChatGPT Go is the least feature-rich of the three free premium tiers. On the plus side, you don’t need to be a subscriber to any telecom service in order to avail the benefits.
Our conclusion
Amongst the three free trials, it seems that OpenAI’s ChatGPT Go offer is the only one that’s actually free to use – no associated cost in the form of a subscription cost of talktime, or data plans. It offers an entry point into the world of more capable AI models and is good for those who need to generate more images and more complex problem-solving requirements.
If the associated subscription cost is thrown out of consideration, Jio’s Google AI Pro offer emerges as the best one here. Its seamless integration with the Google ecosystem, combined with 2TB of storage and advanced video generation, makes it an unparalleled offering for those who rely on Google services.
Airtel’s Perplexity AI Pro comes a close second for students and researchers who need more researcher-friendly help and need to rely on the strength of different large language models.
