Cursor launches cheaper India plan ahead of SpaceX acquisition

AI coding startup Cursor made its biggest push yet into India on Monday, launching Cursor Start, a ₹649-a-month (about $7) subscription built specifically for the country — priced well below its standard $20-a-month Pro plan. The launch comes weeks before Cursor’s expected acquisition by SpaceX is set to close.

India is already Cursor’s third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its user base in the country more than tripling over the past year, the startup said. That scale, plus India’s deep pool of software engineering talent, made it the first market where Cursor chose to localize pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt that we had an opportunity there to right-size the commercial model and drive scale,” Green said. GitHub said earlier this year that India has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the U.S., with more than two million joining in 2026 alone.

Cursor Start includes access to the company’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, plus cloud agents, Cursor’s iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills — but unlike the Pro subscription, it excludes frontier models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic and advanced features including Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK. The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports both card payments and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Green said Cursor would use multiple checks, including measures against VPN use, to keep the India-only plan limited to individual users in the country. OpenAI and Anthropic have also rolled out India-specific plans over the past year, and OpenAI previously launched a sub-$5 ChatGPT Go plan in India before expanding it to other markets — a precedent Green said Cursor could follow elsewhere if the India model succeeds.

Cursor is also expanding in India through new hires, including its first salesperson in the country and a government affairs office, alongside three technical customer support hires, as it grows its presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. Cursor’s India push comes a little over a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the startup in a $60 billion all-stock deal, expected to close in the third quarter; the two companies have been partnered since April to develop a next-generation coding and knowledge-work AI. Green said Cursor will keep operating independently until the deal closes, and that SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster afterward by lowering commercial and operational barriers.

Why it matters

Cursor’s localized pricing bet on India — one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing developer markets — shows AI coding tools competing on price as much as capability, a dynamic that could shape how other coding assistants price themselves in large, price-sensitive developer markets.