Cursor's $7 India plan runs on its own AI models

This article was published on July 28, 2026 Cursor's new ₹649 India plan runs on its own models, not OpenAI's or Anthropic's. That is how it can charge a third of the Pro price and still call it sustainable. Cursor has cut the price of AI coding in India to about $7 a month. The interesting part is how it can afford to. The startup launched Cursor Start on Monday, a ₹649 plan sold only in India, TechCrunch reported. It sits well below the $20 Pro subscription. It is also the first time Cursor has localised its pricing anywhere. India earned the discount. It is already Cursor’s third-largest market and has the highest concentration of power users on the platform. Its user base tripled to more than three million developers in a year, according to Inc42. GitHub counts more than 27 million developers in the country, second only to the US. The plan runs on Cursor’s own models, Composer and Grok 4.5. It leaves out the frontier systems from OpenAI and Anthropic that power the top tier. That choice is the whole trick. Renting the most expensive models is what makes cheap plans lose money. Running on models it controls is what keeps the maths viable at a third of the Pro price. “We felt tha