Airtel grandly calls it a “global first”, as India’s second-largest telecom operator announced this morning that 360 million of its customers—the scope includes prepaid mobile, postpaid mobile, broadband, DTH—will be able to sign up for free access to Adobe Express Premium for a year. This is being valued at somewhere around ₹4,000 per year worth of subscription, a deal that undoubtedly sounds generous. A democratisation of otherwise expensive creative tools for the masses, from students crafting their first resume to small business owners designing festival posters. Not the first of its kind either, and this is something Airtel as well as Reliance Jio have been doing for a while now.
Airtel offers bundles of Apple TV and Apple Music as well as Google One subscriptions, while the Jio’s prime pitch at this time includes a bundled Google AI Pro plan with its Unlimited 5G mobile plans. At this point, I’d urge you to look past the beautifully worded pitches, and call this what it really is — the most expansive bait-and-switch operation disguised as bundled convenience, but with a long term view of your wallet and the credit cards inside that. Airtel isn’t handing out an expensive creative software for free simply because the organisation woke up one morning feeling philanthropic. It’s executing a masterclass in habit formation, a calculated strategy to turn millions of otherwise non-interested users into Adobe’s future paying customers. It unlocks a revenue stream for both, the brand who is bundling the subscription and the telecom player that’s carrying the weight of that bundle.
Think of it this way. Give someone premium access to a tool they didn’t know they needed. Let them spend a year experimenting, building workflows around it, storing their designs in the cloud, getting comfortable with the interface. Then, when the free period ends, hit them with a renewal notice. By that point, a lot of their work is locked inside the ecosystem. The friction of switching to a free or a less costly alternative, at this point, is insurmountable. The ₹398.84 monthly fee suddenly seems reasonable. Necessary, even.
This isn’t speculation—it’s behavioural economics 101. Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and host of The Prof G Pod and co-host of Pivot podcasts, is well-known for coining the term “rundle”. This is an abbreviation for recurring revenue bundle, a description of a business strategy of bundling multiple products or services into a single, subscription-based, predictable revenue stream.
Think of Amazon Prime. It didn’t become ubiquitous because people loved free shipping; it became as necessary as we feel it is today because once you had it, going back to paying for shipping on each order felt like getting robbed. I’d insist the same principle applies here, except instead of shipping, it’s a subscription for an app or a tool.
Perhaps, genius for new adopters
For genuine new users, and the scope is wide enough to have students, small business owners, and first-time content creators within that bracket, this bundling will undoubtedly be useful. Weight the cost of Adobe Express Premium at around ₹4,000 annually, against the fact that one year of it is free. That pricing otherwise would have been a real barrier for someone running a small business in a tier-2 town, who just wants to design a banner for their Diwali sale. Getting enterprise-grade design tools with thousands of templates and premium fonts, or 100GB cloud storage, and an AI chatbot to help with small business strategies is transformative.
My sole worries around this approach rest at a single question — what happens after the free trial period runs out?
After 365 days of creating festival greetings, business cards, and WhatsApp status updates on Adobe express, that small business owner isn’t going to want to start from scratch with Canva’s free tier. Or another app. They’re essentially locked in. Their creative muscle memory has been built around Adobe’s interface. Their files are stored in Adobe’s cloud. The conversion from “free trial user” to “paying subscriber” becomes almost automatic. And now it’s time to part with the big bucks. And Airtel? They’d be delighted because users aren’t just staying for the mobile plan—they’re staying for the entire ecosystem of bundled services they’ve become dependent on. And the billing likely happens through the mobile or broadband bill. That’s subscriber retention and average revenue per user (ARPU), both sorted in one go.
Telecom, and revenue streams of tomorrow
Airtel’s Adobe partnership isn’t an anomaly. It’s part of a broader strategic shift among telecom players in the country. Value adds, as the business folks like to call it. With voice and data margins shrinking, the future revenue stream isn’t in selling you a slightly more expensive recharge or postpaid plan; it’s in selling you app subscriptions you didn’t know you needed until you had them.
Consider Airtel’s earlier partnership with Perplexity AI. Starting in July 2025, all Airtel customers received a free one-year subscription to Perplexity Pro, normally priced at around ₹17,000 annually. The AI-powered search tool offers access to GPT-4, Claude 3, deep research capabilities, and image generation. For power users, it’s habit forming. For Airtel, it’s another retention mechanism. Once you’ve integrated Perplexity into your research workflow—whether for academic papers, business analysis, or just satisfying your late-night curiosity about obscure topics—you’re unlikely to let the subscription lapse. The strategy mirrors what Apple has done with Apple One, which bundles Music, TV+, Arcade, and iCloud storage into a single monthly payment.
The bundling wars have begun, and telecoms are positioning themselves as the delivery mechanism—the Uber for subscription services, if you will.
What makes this particularly shrewd is the three-way value exchange. Adobe gets 360 million potential long-term subscribers without spending a rupee on customer acquisition. Airtel gets to reduce churn by making their plans more valuable through value-added services. And users get genuinely useful tools they might not have otherwise tried.
Let me say this clearly—I am not for a moment saying any of this is inherently evil. There is a definite value and convenience emerging from this bundling. You’d rather prefer one bundle, than to juggle three different subscription dates, tenures and renewals. That said, I’d be very worried about an inherent tension that’ll only really emerge a few months down the road. There has been an example of it already. Users who activated Perplexity Pro through Airtel’s offer began receiving requests to add credit card details to continue using the service, the intention being easy charge for renewal later.
We are fast moving into an era where standalone subscriptions are just too inconvenient. Be it streaming apps, or be it AI bundles with telecom bills, a single point of transaction is convenient. Economics comes secondary. The customer’s only choice is whether they want to commit or not. Because make no mistake—if you do, you’ll be committing probably long term. And that free Adobe subscription? That’s not a gift. That’s an audition for the role of a permanent paying customer in the great subscription economy. Whether you get the part is up to you—but the telecoms and tech companies are betting heavily that you will. After all, nobody wants to start designing their Diwali posters from scratch next year. It becomes a lifestyle choice.
(Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor at HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice versa. The views expressed are personal.)
