Free AI is suddenly everywhere in India. Across LinkedIn threads and tech forums, users are sharing access links, discount codes, and lifetime free trials to tools from OpenAI, Google, and smaller startups. Companies have come up with “student plans” offering free subscriptions to their latest chat models.
The common refrain, “This feels like Jio all over again.”
When it’s not Jio being invoked, the comparisons turn darker. Some users suggest India is being turned into a testing ground. That free access is just data extraction disguised as generosity. Millions of people, they warn, are training global AI models without realizing it.
Those reactions aren’t random. Indians have seen this play before.
The Price of Free AI
In India, few consumer behaviors are as predictable as what happens after a product is offered “free”. Free SIMs become paid plans. Cashbacks dry up once digital payments become a reflex. Generosity turns into infrastructure.
Companies that can afford massive upfront losses, Reliance, Paytm, Flipkart, Amazon, and now AI giants, have long followed a simple formula, spend early, scale fast, and let habit do the rest. Once a tool becomes routine, it stops needing to sell itself.
The question, then, isn’t why these companies are giving away AI tools. It’s why India, and why now.
A Market Built on Elasticity
India is one of the world’s most price-sensitive markets. According to Bain & Company’s 2023 India Shopper Study, 76% of Indian consumers switch brands for a price difference as small as 10–12%, compared to under 30% in the US or UK.
The BCG Emerging Markets Consumer Report (2024) goes further, confirming that India’s adoption curve is driven more by “perceived value” than brand loyalty. Indians are “platform loyal but brand-agnostic”. Quick to adopt what feels like a deal, but equally quick to move on if that value fades.
The playbook is blunt. Spend heavily upfront, make the product free or almost free, and wait for it to turn into habit. Once it’s woven into daily life, the revenues follow.
India moves quickly when the value looks exceptional. Prices drop, and users shift in bulk. But they only stay once the product becomes routine. That is why penetration pricing, launching with something that feels wildly cheap or overloaded with value, has become the most reliable way to break into the Indian market.
How India Rewards Aggressive Entry Plays
The pattern goes back decades.
- Nirma vs. Surf (Late 1970s): When Surf sold detergent at ₹13 per kg, Nirma entered at ₹3, targeting low-income households with door-to-door sales. Within years, Nirma not only expanded the detergent market beyond cities but captured nearly 60% of it.
- Reliance Jio (2016): Jio rewrote India’s telecom history by eliminating switching costs, free data, free voice calls, zero setup fees. Within six months, it crossed 100 million subscribers, shocking global analysts. By pairing that with the almost-free JioPhone, it pulled feature-phone users into the digital fold. By 2024, Jio controlled more than half of India’s wireless subscribers.
- UPI (2020–2025): India’s digital payments revolution followed the same logic. By 2025, UPI handled 85% of retail digital payment volumes, according to the RBI. Zero fees for merchants, near-instant QR deployment, and public incentives built a frictionless system that became a habit. Everyday, everywhere, unavoidable.
Free isn’t generosity. It’s the fastest route to ubiquity.
The Dual Value of Free AI
Free AI achieves two things.
First, it builds habits. When college students draft essays with ChatGPT or Gemini, when professionals outline reports or coders debug through prompts, the tools quietly become embedded in routines. The mental cost of moving away then feels higher than the monetary one.
Second, free usage feeds the models themselves. Every interaction helps improve how these systems think and respond. India’s linguistic diversity and real-world complexity make it a goldmine for machine learning feedback. Which brings us back to why this push matters.
Why India and Why Now?
India has over 750 million smartphone users and nearly 900 million internet users, according to TRAI and IAMAI estimates. It’s also the world’s largest consumer of mobile data, averaging 20–25 GB per user per month, far above most developed markets.
So when millions here use free AI tools daily, in schools, offices, and creator communities, it isn’t just product testing. It’s population-scale model training. The more India interacts, the smarter these systems become. Better tools create stronger habits. Stronger habits generate richer data. Richer data builds better tools.
It’s a perfect loop. For the companies. For India, the question remains. Who ultimately benefits when the price of entry is free?
