Cursor launches India-specific subscription tier priced at ₹649 per month

Cursor launched Cursor Start, a ₹649-per-month subscription designed specifically for the Indian market, which the company says is now its third-largest globally and home to its highest concentration of power users. The India-specific plan is priced well below Cursor’s standard $20-per-month Pro subscription, offering access to Cursor’s Composer 2.5 model and Grok 4.5 with higher usage limits than the free tier. It does not include access to frontier models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, nor advanced features including Bugbot, Auto Mode, Automations, and the Cursor SDK.

Cursor’s head of Asia-Pacific and Japan, Simon Green, told TechCrunch the company aimed to “right-size the commercial model and drive scale” in India, citing the country’s deep pool of software engineering talent and technical competency. Cursor’s user base in India has more than tripled over the past year, and the company is expanding its local presence with its first sales hire in the country, additional leadership in Delhi, a government affairs office, and three technical customer support hires across Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

The India-specific pricing is billed in Indian rupees and supports payments via credit and debit cards as well as India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Cursor plans to use multiple checks to restrict the subscription to individual users in India, including measures to deter access through virtual private networks (VPNs).

Cursor is not the first to tailor 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. Green told TechCrunch that if the model proves successful, Cursor could expand localized pricing to other markets, noting that OpenAI previously launched its sub-$5 ChatGPT Go in India before expanding the lower-priced subscription elsewhere.

Cursor’s enterprise push in India remains early, with adoption so far driven largely by individual developers, startups, and universities. Green said the company sees opportunities in sectors including banking and large enterprises as it expands local sales efforts. He emphasized that the India-specific pricing was designed to be commercially sustainable, built around Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party frontier models.

The India expansion comes weeks before SpaceX’s planned $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor, which is expected to close in Q3. SpaceX has partnered with Cursor since April to develop a next-generation “coding and knowledge work AI,” and Cursor will continue to operate independently until the transaction closes. SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers once the deal is finalized.