Cursor launches a $7-a-month plan for India as it eyes the world's second-largest developer market

Key points

• Cursor launched an India-only subscription called Cursor Start at ₹649 (roughly $7) a month on Monday, well below its standard $20-a-month Pro tier.
• India is already Cursor's third-largest market globally, with its user base there more than tripling over the past year.
• GitHub reported earlier this year that India has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the United States.
• SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal last month, with the transaction expected to close in the third quarter of 2025.
• Cursor says the lower-priced plan is commercially sustainable because it runs on its own AI models, which cost less to operate than paid models from outside providers.

Cursor, the AI-assisted coding tool that helps software developers write and fix code faster, now has a plan priced specifically for India. At ₹649 a month (about $7), Cursor Start costs a third of what the company charges everywhere else.

The price gap is deliberate. Simon Green, Cursor's head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch that India's engineering talent and sheer market size made it the obvious first place to try localised pricing. "We felt that we had an opportunity there to right-size the commercial model and drive scale," Green said.

What do Indian developers actually get for $7?

Cursor Start includes access to Cursor's own Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, both AI systems designed to help with coding tasks. Subscribers also get higher usage limits than the free tier, cloud agents (software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own), an iOS app, and plugin support.

What it does not include matters too. The $7 plan locks out frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the two largest outside AI providers, as well as advanced features such as Bugbot, Auto Mode and Automations. Those stay behind the $20 Pro paywall.

Green says the plan is sustainable precisely because it avoids those pricier outside models. Running Cursor's own AI keeps the operating costs low enough to make $7 work without losing money on each subscriber.

Is this just a discount, or something bigger?

It is a calculated bet on a very large market. India had more than 27 million developers on GitHub this year, second only to the United States, with over two million joining in 2026 alone. Cursor's Indian user base more than tripled in the past year, and the company says Indian users already rank as its most intensive power users anywhere.

Cursor is not the first to try this. OpenAI launched a sub-$5 ChatGPT Go plan in India before rolling it out to other countries. Anthropic has also introduced India-specific pricing. Competition for this market is real.

The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports UPI, India's widely used mobile payment system, alongside standard cards.

What about the SpaceX deal?

Cursor's India push arrives roughly a month after Elon Musk's SpaceX agreed to acquire the startup in a $60 billion all-stock deal. Green says the India expansion was already underway before the deal was announced, and Cursor will operate independently until the transaction closes.

One possible upside after closing: SpaceX already runs Starlink, its satellite internet service, in India. Green suggested that existing footprint could lower the cost and complexity of expanding Cursor's commercial operations there.

Cursor is also hiring in India, with its first local salesperson already on board and plans for a second leader based in Delhi, plus three technical support hires.

The honest takeaway: If you are an Indian developer sitting on the free tier and hitting its limits, $7 a month is a reasonable trial. Just know what you are not getting: the most powerful outside AI models stay in the pricier plan. Start there and upgrade only if you genuinely need more.