Cursor launches a cheaper Indian subscription ahead of the closing of its acquisition by SpaceX
Cursor has launched a cheaper Cursor Start subscription for India at 649 rupees (~7 USD) per month, with a more limited set of models and features than the Pro plan at 20 USD, shortly before the planned closing of its acquisition by SpaceX for 60 billion dollars.
Cursor has launched a cheaper subscription called Cursor Start, currently intended exclusively for India, at 649 Indian rupees per month (approximately 7 dollars), compared with the standard Pro subscription at 20 dollars per month. According to the company, India is its third-largest market, with the highest concentration of heavy users, and the number of users in the country has more than tripled over the past year.
The Cursor Start plan includes access to the company's own Composer 2.5 model and to the Grok 4.5 model, higher usage limits than the free version, cloud agents, an iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks and skills. However, it does not include access to frontier models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic or the advanced features Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations and Cursor SDK, which are included in the Pro plan. According to Simon Green, the head of Cursor for Asia-Pacific and Japan, the lower price is based on the company's own models with lower operating costs, so it is intended to be a commercially sustainable model, rather than a loss-making product. Payments are processed in rupees and also support the Indian payment system UPI; the company says it is introducing measures to prevent users from bypassing the regional restriction through VPNs.
Cursor is also strengthening its sales team in India, has made its first sales hire, is preparing to hire another senior executive in Delhi, is building a government relations presence and is expanding technical support in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai. According to Green, the enterprise segment is still at an early stage, with growth so far driven more by individual developers, startups and universities. OpenAI previously made a similar move with regionally lower pricing for ChatGPT Go and subsequently expanded the service to other countries; according to the article, Anthropic has also introduced Indian pricing.
The move comes roughly a month after SpaceX announced an agreement to acquire Cursor in an all-stock deal valued at 60 billion dollars, with closing expected in the third quarter. According to Green, the expansion into India was planned before this agreement, and Cursor will operate independently until the transaction closes; after the acquisition is completed, he says the existing presence of SpaceX in India through Starlink could further facilitate the expansion.
Why it matters
It shows that companies offering AI developer tools are moving toward regionally differentiated pricing with a limited set of models instead of a single global price, which could affect both availability and the mix of features in individual countries and signals the direction of future competition between Cursor, OpenAI and Anthropic in large emerging markets.
Relevant practical impact
What this means
For a business
Cursor is introducing regional price differentiation, a lower price for a more limited set of features and models, as a tool for growth in a specific large market, indicating a direction that pricing policies for AI developer tools could take elsewhere as well.
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