Cursor makes its biggest bet on India with localized pricing ahead of its purchase by SpaceX

Cursor, the AI-assisted coding startup that Elon Musk and SpaceX plan to acquire for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, has taken its most ambitious step yet in its expansion into India. The company unveiled Cursor Start, its first subscription designed specifically for a single country, priced at 649 rupees a month (about $7), well below the $20 a month of its standard Pro plan. The move comes weeks before the SpaceX deal is expected to close, slated for the third quarter.

According to Simon Green, head of Cursor for Asia-Pacific and Japan, India is already the company's third-largest market worldwide and the one with the highest proportion of 'power users', with a user base that has more than tripled over the past year. That combination of scale and a vast pool of software engineering talent made India the first market where Cursor decided to 'right-size' its commercial model, in Green's words; he stressed that the country's technical competence and existing engineering talent were a natural fit for this strategy.

The market context backs up that bet: according to GitHub data cited in the article, India already has more than 27 million developers on the platform, the second-highest figure in the world after the United States, with more than two million new additions in 2026 alone. This volume of technical talent explains why the big generative AI companies are actively competing to win users in the country; in fact, both OpenAI and Anthropic have also launched India-specific plans over the past year.

As for the plan's features, Cursor Start includes access to the company's own Composer 2.5 model and to Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, plus cloud agents, the iOS app, extensions, support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), 'hooks' and 'skills'. Unlike the $20 Pro plan, however, Start does not provide access to frontier models from providers such as OpenAI or Anthropic, nor to advanced features such as Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations or the Cursor SDK. The stated goal is to broaden access for developers who need more capacity than the free tier offers, without replacing the company's flagship offering.

The plan is billed in Indian rupees and accepts credit and debit card payments as well as payments through the country's Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Green said Cursor will apply several checks to ensure the India-only subscription is available solely to individual users within the country, including measures to deter access via virtual private networks (VPNs).

A relevant point in the article is that Cursor is not positioning this plan as a loss-leader. Green explained that the lower price is sustainable because it relies on the company's own AI models, whose operating cost is lower than depending mainly on third-party frontier models. Asked whether this localized pricing strategy could extend to other markets, Green did not rule it out: he said the company will keep doing everything it can to meet the demand of its current customers and that, if the model proves to work, it would be 'crazy' to rule out applying it elsewhere. The article points to OpenAI as a precedent: it launched its ChatGPT Go plan for under $5 in India first before expanding it to other markets.

Beyond pricing, Cursor is strengthening its local presence with new hires: it has brought on its first salesperson in India and expects to add another executive in Delhi, as well as building a government affairs office and adding three technical customer support hires, as part of its expansion in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai. According to Green, enterprise adoption of Cursor in India is still at an early stage, driven above all by individual developers, startups and universities, although the company sees significant opportunities in sectors such as banking and large corporations as it expands its local sales efforts.

Finally, the article frames this move within SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor, agreed just over a month ago following SpaceX's stock market debut and expected to close in the third quarter. The two companies have been collaborating since April on the development of a 'next-generation AI for coding and knowledge work'. Green specified that Cursor will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes and that the India expansion plans were already under way before the deal became known. Once the purchase closes, however, SpaceX's existing presence in India through Starlink could, according to Green, help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.