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Dharmender Kumar
Dharmender Kumar

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Cursor Terminates Student Discount in India: The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Before Starting , Picture this :)- You're a Tier 3 college student in India 🥲 running on 2 hours of sleep, 4 cups of chai, and sheer delusion. Suddenly, Cursor AI drops a free Pro plan for students.
GPT-4o? 500 fast requests?
Bro, take my student ID, my Aadhar, my soul — whatever you need. 😭💻

But just when you and Cursor were becoming besties...
BAM! They yank the student discount in India.

BUT WHY....?

A few legends thought,
😎 Why get a CS degree when I can sell fake student accounts and get rich?"
And they did. 😤💸

Cursor’s kind-hearted “Free Pro for Students” offer turned into an underground economy faster than you can say Photoshop. People were whipping up fake college IDs, selling accounts, and basically speedrunning the downfall of a good thing.
So what did Cursor do?
Removed India from the list of student discount.

Legit students: Bro, what did we do?☹️
Cursor: Blame the Jeet(just an imaginary name) who sold 69 fake accounts on X or Telegram or Whatsapp😤.

The student plan was meant to help real students with valid emails/IDs via SheerID. But once it got flooded with fakes, Cursor had two options:

1). Go broke 💸

2). Hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE on India’s student discount.
They chose survival....🫠

The only bad thing that happened was

Legit Students Got Wrecked

Tons of real students used Cursor to code like pros.
Hackathons? ✅
College projects? ✅
AI-powered debugging at 3AM? ✅

But every coin 🪙 has 2 sides

Yes, losing Cursor Pro for Indian students hurts—but maybe, just maybe, it’s a blessing in disguise.

Now, students might-

1).Focus more on learning the core concepts, instead of over-relying on AI to autocomplete their homework.

2).Build a deeper understanding of how code works, rather than what an LLM thinks might work.

3).Turn frustration into fuel—and possibly build something even better, homegrown and accessible.

some thoughts

Trust is fragile. Abuse it, and everyone pays the price.
An entire generation of devs just got a front-row seat to how ethics aren't optional in tech.
Not the lesson we asked for—but one we clearly needed. 👀

love you
Dharm

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