Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet before acquiring SpaceX at local prices

Weeks before closing its expected acquisition by SpaceX, AI crypto startup Cursor is making its biggest push into India yet, launching its first country-specific subscription as the company bets on one of the world’s largest developer markets to drive its next phase of growth.

On Monday, the startup introduced Cursor Start, a US$649-a-month (about US$7) subscription built specifically for India — and at a much lower price than the standard US$20-a-month Pro subscription.

The move reflects India’s increasing importance to Cursor’s business. The startup says India is already its third-largest market globally and home to the highest concentration of energy users, with its user base in the country more than tripling over the past year.

This scale, coupled with the deep pool of software engineering talent in India, made it the first market in which Cursor chose to localize pricing, Simon Green, Cursor’s president for Asia Pacific and Japan, told TechCrunch. “We felt we had an opportunity to right-size the business model and scale up,” Green said. “The country’s technical proficiency and engineering talent already exist make it a very natural fit.”

India has emerged as one of the largest software development hubs in the world. Earlier this year, GitHub said the country has more than 27 million developers on its platform, second only to the United States, with more than 2 million developers joining in 2026 alone.

Cursor Start includes access to Cursor’s Model Composer 2.5 and Grok 4.5, with higher usage limits than the free tier, along with cloud agents, its iOS app, plug-ins, Model Context Protocol support, hooks, and skills. The startup said the plan targets developers who need more AI-assisted coding capacity than the free tier offerings without upgrading to the full Pro subscription.

The lower-priced plan is intended to expand access rather than replace Cursor’s main offering, Green said. Unlike the $20-per-month Pro subscription, Start doesn’t include access to frontier AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, or advanced features including 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).

Green told TechCrunch that Cursor will use multiple checks to ensure that the India-only subscription is only available to individual users in the country, including measures to prevent people from accessing the plan through virtual private networks (VPNs).

The index is not alone in designing its prices 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.

While Cursor Start is initially limited to India, Green told TechCrunch that the startup could expand local pricing to other markets if the model proves successful.

“We will continue to do everything we can to fuel demand and serve the customers who use us,” Green said. “Now, if this model proves we can take it to other markets, maybe we will. But I think it would be crazy to say we would never do it anywhere else.”

OpenAI provides a precedent for this strategy, launching the sub-$5 ChatGPT Go app in India before expanding the low-priced subscription to other markets.

In addition to the local pricing strategy, Cursor is also expanding its presence in India with new appointments. Green told TechCrunch that the startup recently hired its first sales representative in India and expects another leader to join Delhi. The company is also building its own government affairs office, along with three technical customer support staff, as it expands its presence in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai.

Green said Cursor’s enterprise push is still in its early stages in India, where adoption so far has been largely driven by individual developers, startups and universities. He said Corsor sees significant opportunities in sectors including banks and large institutions as it expands local sales efforts.

Green said the pricing for India was designed to be commercially sustainable and not a loss leader. He said the lower-priced plan is viable because it is built on Cursor’s own AI models, which carry lower operating costs than relying primarily on third-party parametric models.

Cursor’s expansion into India comes just over a month after Elon Musk’s SpaceX agreed to acquire the AI ​​development startup in an all-stock deal worth $60 billion, following SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter. However, SpaceX has partnered with Cursor since April to develop next-generation “AI for coding and knowledge businesses.”

Green said Cursor will continue to operate independently until the deal closes and that the company’s expansion plans in India were already underway before the deal. However, once the acquisition closes, Green said SpaceX’s existing presence in India through Starlink could help Cursor expand faster by lowering commercial and operational barriers.