Weeks before its expected acquisition by SpaceX closes, AI coding startup Cursor is making its biggest foray into India yet, launching its first country subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to power its next phase of growth.
On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a ₹649 (about $7) monthly subscription built specifically for India. The price is well below Cursor’s standard $20/month Pro subscription.
The move reflects India’s growing importance to Cursol’s business. The company says India is already its third-largest market in the world and home to the highest concentration of power users, with the country’s user base more than tripling in the past year.
Its size, coupled with India’s deep pool of software engineering talent, made India the first market where Cursor chose to localize its pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt there was an opportunity there to right-size and scale a commercial model,” Green said. “Given the technological capabilities of this country and the engineering talent that already exists, it’s a very natural fit.”
India has emerged as one of the world’s largest software development hubs. Earlier this year, GitHub announced that the country has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the United States, and that more than 2 million will join in 2026 alone.
Cursor Start includes access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 models and Grok 4.5, along with the cloud agent, its iOS app, plugins, model context protocol support, hooks, and skills, with higher usage limits than the free tier. The company said the plan is aimed at developers who need more AI-assisted coding capabilities than the free tier offers without upgrading to a full Pro subscription.
Green said the lower-priced plan is intended to expand access to Cursor’s core products rather than replace them. Unlike the $20/month Pro subscription, Start does not include access to frontier AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic or advanced features like Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and Cursor SDKs.
The plan is billed in Indian Rupees and supports payments through credit and debit cards and Unified Payments Interface of India (UPI).
Green told TechCrunch that Cursor will conduct multiple checks to ensure India-only subscriptions are only available to individual users in the country, including measures to prevent people from accessing the plans through virtual private networks (VPNs).
Cursor isn’t the only company adjusting its pricing for India. OpenAI and Anthropic have also rolled out India-specific plans over the past year, as global AI companies compete for users in one of the world’s fastest-growing AI markets.
Cursor Start will initially be limited to India, but Green told TechCrunch that if the model is successful, the startup could expand localized pricing to other markets.
“We will continue to do everything we can to stimulate demand and serve the clients who rely on us,” Green said. “If it proves that this model can be implemented in other markets, then we probably will. But I think it would be crazy to say that we would never introduce it in other markets.”
OpenAI is expanding its low-cost subscriptions to other markets after launching ChatGPT Go for less than $5 in India, setting one precedent for this strategy.
In addition to a locally tailored pricing strategy, Cursor is expanding its presence in India through new hires. Green told TechCrunch that the company recently hired its first sales representative in India and expects another leader to join in Delhi. The company is also hiring three technical customer support people and building government offices as it expands its presence in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai.
Green said Cursor’s enterprise push is still in its infancy in India, where adoption so far has been largely driven by individual developers, startups and universities. He said he sees big opportunities in sectors including banks and large corporations as Cursor expands its local distribution efforts.
Green said India-specific pricing is designed to be commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader. He said the low-priced plan is viable because it is built around Cursor’s proprietary AI models and has lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party Frontier models.
Cursor’s expansion into India comes a little more than a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI coding startup in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion, following SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter. However, SpaceX has been partnering with Cursor since April to develop next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI.”
Mr. Green said Cursol would continue to operate independently until the transaction was completed, noting that the company’s expansion plans in India were already in motion before the transaction. But Green said that once the acquisition is completed, SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor scale faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.
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