# SpaceX is buying Cursor for $60 billion while the AI coding startup makes its boldest bet on India yet > Source: > Published: 2026-07-28 05:25:07+00:00 *Cursor's India pricing push is current and real. The SpaceX deal is real too, but the old draft blurred the sourcing and overstated several details that need to be kept clean.* The story isn't that Cursor suddenly became cheap. The story is that Anysphere is trying to make Cursor harder to dislodge in India before SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition closes. If you're a developer paying out of your own pocket, that difference matters. Cursor said on July 28 that it has launched Cursor Start in India at ₹649 a month, tax included, with payment through UPI or card. The company also said its user base in India has tripled over the past year to more than 3 million developers, making India its third-largest market globally. That's not small. It is a direct answer to a market where $20 a month can still feel like a corporate price being pushed onto individual builders. The Start plan sits between Cursor's Free and Pro tiers. According to Cursor's own announcement, it includes access to Grok 4.5 and Composer, more agent requests than the free plan, cloud agents, Cursor for iOS, plugins, MCP servers, hooks, and skills. It does not include the full Pro package, including the most advanced outside models, Bugbot, Auto mode, Automations, the Cursor SDK, or on-demand usage past the included limits. The price is the point. ₹649 is roughly a third of what Anthropic is charging for Claude Pro in India, where TechCrunch reported this month that Claude Pro is appearing at ₹2,000 a month when billed annually. OpenAI went lower in August 2025 with ChatGPT Go at ₹399 a month in India, also with UPI support, according to TechCrunch. Cursor is not copying either company exactly. It is carving out a paid coding tier that gives you more than a trial without giving away the whole Pro product. ## The SpaceX Deal Is Still The Shadow SpaceX's acquisition of Anysphere was announced on June 16, not alongside the India launch. Reuters reported that SpaceX agreed to buy the company behind Cursor in an all-stock deal valued at $60 billion, and a securities filing said the transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions. That filing is the hard anchor here. TechCrunch reported in April that SpaceX had first struck an option agreement with Cursor. Under that arrangement, SpaceX could either acquire Cursor for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for a collaboration if the deal did not go ahead. The June filing shows SpaceX chose the acquisition path. You don't need to dress that up. It is already one of the largest AI software deals on the table. The strategic logic is plain enough. SpaceX absorbed xAI earlier this year, and TechCrunch has reported that Musk was rebuilding xAI after saying it was not built right the first time around. Cursor gives SpaceX something xAI did not have at the same scale: a coding product that developers already use every day. Forbes reported in June that Cursor had reached $4 billion in annualized revenue, up from $2 billion in February, a figure Bloomberg had previously reported. That doesn't mean Cursor becomes a SpaceX internal tool overnight. Frankly, that would be the fastest way to damage what SpaceX is buying. Cursor's value is developer trust and daily usage - and its ability to sit between models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and others without visibly favouring any of them. If users start to believe the product exists mainly to push Grok, they'll notice. ## India Is The Live Test India is where that trust now gets tested at price. Cursor says Indian developers run more agent requests per developer than users anywhere else. That is useful behavior if it turns into revenue, and expensive behavior if it stays on the free tier. Cursor Start is the attempt to turn heavy usage into a paid habit without asking every student or working engineer to jump straight to Pro. You can see the tension in the product itself. Start gives access to Cursor's own models and Grok 4.5, but keeps OpenAI and Anthropic's top models behind Pro. That protects the higher tier while still letting Indian users pay in rupees and use UPI. It is still a constraint. But it is a constraint that matches the economics of AI coding tools, where every extra frontier-model request has a real cost behind it. The earlier draft treated the India rollout as if it proved a broad emerging-market strategy, naming Brazil, Indonesia and other markets as likely next stops. Cursor has not announced that. The company only said Start is available in India today, so the honest version is narrower: India is the first clear test of whether Cursor can localize pricing without breaking its premium plan. Developers should watch the fine print. If Start remains a useful middle tier, Cursor gets a paid base in one of the world's largest developer markets before SpaceX takes control. If it feels too limited, users will compare it with ChatGPT Go, Claude's India pricing, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, and whatever their employer already pays for. The acquisition is the headline. The ₹649 plan is where Cursor finds out how much pricing power it really has. **Also read:** [How Claude Code and VS Code turned Anthropic from a safety lab into a developer phenomenon](https://startupfortune.com/how-claude-code-and-vs-code-turned-anthropic-from-a-safety-lab-into-a-developer-phenomenon/) • [China is giving its best AI models away free and that should worry OpenAI](https://startupfortune.com/china-is-giving-its-best-ai-models-away-free-and-that-should-worry-openai/) • [Samsung posted 1,800% profit growth and its stock fell anyway](https://startupfortune.com/samsung-posted-1800-profit-growth-and-its-stock-fell-anyway/)