Cursor, an AI coding startup, is making its largest India-specific push yet, launching a new subscription plan as it prepares for its acquisition by SpaceX. The Cursor Start subscription, priced at ₹649 per month (about $7), is designed to cater to India's expanding developer community and is significantly cheaper than Cursor’s standard $20-a-month Pro subscription. The move underscores India's growing significance to Cursor’s business, with the startup highlighting the country as its third-largest market and home to its highest concentration of power users. The user base in India has more than tripled over the past year, according to the company.
The Cursor Start plan includes access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, alongside cloud agents, its iOS app, plugins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. The subscription is aimed at developers who need more AI-assisted coding capacity than the free tier offers but do not require the full Pro subscription. It does not include access to frontier AI models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, or advanced features like Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK. The plan is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments through credit and debit cards as well as India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Simon Green, Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, said the company will use multiple checks to ensure the India-only subscription is available only to individual users in the country, including measures to deter access through virtual private networks (VPNs). Green emphasized that the India-specific pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable rather than a loss leader. He noted that the lower-priced plan is viable because it is built around Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party frontier models.
Source: techcrunch
