The startup bets on its third-largest market with a localized ₹649 subscription, weeks before its deal with Elon Musk’s company is set to close.
AI coding startup Cursor has introduced Cursor Start, its first country-specific subscription, priced at roughly $7 a month for users in India, well below its standard $20 Pro plan. The launch comes just weeks ahead of Cursor’s expected acquisition by SpaceX and marks the company’s biggest push yet into the Indian market.
Why India
Cursor said India is already its third-largest market worldwide and has the highest concentration of power users, with its local user base more than tripling over the past year. Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the country’s scale and deep engineering talent pool made it the natural first choice for localized pricing, adding that the company wanted to “right-size the commercial model and drive scale.”
What’s Included and What’s Not
Cursor Start offers access to the company’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, along with cloud agents, its iOS app, and Model Context Protocol support. However, the plan excludes frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as advanced features like Bugbot and Auto Mode, which remain exclusive to the Pro tier. Green said the plan is commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader, since it relies on Cursor’s own lower-cost models.
Following a Familiar Playbook
Cursor is jumping on the bandwagon of OpenAI and Anthropic by announcing its own pricing for India, similarly to how OpenAI launched a cheaper-than-$5 ChatGPT Go plan in the country before rolling out the same offering elsewhere. Co-founder Green noted that Cursor is poised to do the same if the experiment proves successful.
The SpaceX Deal Looms
The raise comes a little more than a month after SpaceX agreed to acquire Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal, set to close in Q3. Green explained that, until then, Cursor will continue to operate independently, although Starlink’s impending arrival in India would benefit it.
