Cursor launches India-specific $7/month plan ahead of SpaceX acquisition

AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest India push yet with the launch of Cursor Start, a ₹649/month (approx. $7) subscription tailored specifically for the Indian market. The plan, announced weeks before Cursor's expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, is priced well below the standard $20/month Pro subscription. Cursor Start includes access to Cursor's Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, cloud agents, iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. However, it does not include frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, nor advanced features like Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, or the Cursor SDK. The subscription is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments via credit/debit cards and UPI. Cursor will implement geo-restrictions, including VPN detection, to ensure the plan is only available to individual users in India.

India is already Cursor's third-largest market globally and home to its highest concentration of power users, with its user base more than tripling over the past year. The country hosts over 27 million developers on GitHub, the second-largest pool globally. Cursor's head of Asia-Pacific, Simon Green, emphasized that the localized pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable, not a loss leader, because it relies on Cursor's own AI models with lower operating costs. The startup is also expanding its local team, hiring its first salesperson in India and building a government affairs office across Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. Green noted that if successful, Cursor might expand localized pricing to other markets, following precedents like OpenAI's ChatGPT Go in India. The move intensifies competition among AI companies targeting India's fast-growing developer market.