What your dev stack actually costs in India (after forex + GST)

My card statement said ₹29,189. PostHog's pricing page said $250. That ₹5,289 gap is not a rounding error, and it repeats on every dollar-billed tool a developer in India pays for. I priced my whole stack the way the bank actually charges it, and then went and figured out how much of it is recoverable. Most of it is, and most people never claim it.

Here is the full picture, because the two costs hiding behind a "$X/mo" sticker work very differently, and one of them you can get back.

Cost 1: the card forex markup (you cannot get this back)

Every charge in a foreign currency on an Indian card carries a currency-conversion markup. On most credit cards it is 1.5% to 3.5%, and 18% GST is charged on the markup itself. It is tiny per transaction and invisible until you reconcile the statement against the invoice.

This one has a real lever: the card. A regular credit card charges 3.5% plus GST on every dollar you spend. A zero-forex-markup card (several Indian banks and fintechs issue them) charges 0%. If your dollar SaaS spend runs into lakhs a year, moving those charges to a zero-forex card is the change that pays for itself fastest, because it applies to every foreign charge you will ever make, not just software.

Cost 2: 18% GST, and who is actually on the hook

This is where it gets misunderstood, so here is the accurate version. Two different rules apply depending on who you are.

If you are an unregistered individual (no GSTIN), foreign digital services fall under India's OIDAR rules. The overseas vendor is supposed to register in India and charge you 18% GST directly at checkout. Some large ones do, and you will see GST on the invoice. Many smaller dev tools do not, which is its own grey area. Either way, you cannot reclaim it. It is cost.

If you are GST-registered (most companies, and many freelancers past the threshold), it is the Reverse Charge Mechanism. The vendor bills you with no Indian GST. You self-account for 18% IGST on that import of service, pay it, and claim it straight back as input tax credit, provided the tool is for business. Net effect: zero. The 18% washes out.

So the same tool has two real prices. About 3.5% over the mid-market rate if you are registered and reclaim. About 22% over it if you cannot. Here is the catch that costs teams the most: plenty of registered businesses pay the RCM IGST and never claim the credit, because their accountant is not applying reverse charge to foreign SaaS. That is 18% of every foreign subscription quietly left on the floor.

I checked whether the common dev tools issue an Indian GST invoice at all. None of the ones below do, which means for a registered team the only route to that credit is the RCM self-invoice, not a vendor invoice.

The stack, priced the way it bills

All-in monthly rupees, for someone who cannot reclaim GST:

Indicative: USD around ₹95.6, forex 3.5%, GST 18%. Not a bill.

Where it stops being survivable: per seat, times headcount

The single-seat numbers look fine. The per-seat ones do not, because they multiply by team size and again by the premium.

A three-person team on Cursor, Vercel, Figma, Notion and Copilot, plus one Sentry account: about ₹1,00,000 a year at the sticker mid-market rate, about ₹1,23,000 priced the way it bills, if you cannot reclaim GST. The ₹23,000 difference buys you nothing. It is forex plus a tax you did not know you were carrying.

How to actually get the GST back

If you are registered, this is the biggest lever on the list, and it is procedural, not clever:

1. Confirm the spend is for business use.
2. Raise a self-invoice for the import of service (this is the document RCM requires, since the foreign vendor gives you none).
3. Pay the 18% IGST under reverse charge in your GSTR-3B.
4. Claim the same amount as input tax credit in the same return.

Done monthly, it nets to zero. The failure mode is skipping step 4, or your CA not treating foreign SaaS as an import of service at all. It is worth one specific conversation: "are we applying RCM and claiming ITC on our foreign software subscriptions?" I am a developer, not a CA, so confirm the mechanics for your own situation, but this is the question that recovers the money.

If you are not yet registered and your foreign SaaS spend is meaningful, the reclaimable 18% is part of the case for registering. On a ₹1.5 lakh a year dollar stack, that is roughly ₹27,000 a year you currently cannot touch.

Two smaller levers

Pay annually where a tool is a keeper. The annual plan is discounted and you take the forex hit once instead of twelve times. Use an INR-billed tool where a real one exists. Rupee billing skips the forex layer entirely. For billing, CRM and accounting there are genuine Indian options. For core dev infrastructure there usually is not, and that is fine, you just budget the real number.

Work out any tool yourself

The formula, for a monthly USD price P and your card's forex markup f:

• Can reclaim GST: real rupees per month = P x 95.6 x (1 + f)
• Cannot reclaim: real rupees per month = P x 95.6 x (1 + f) x 1.18

Swap 95.6 for the live USD rate and f for your card's markup (0 if you use a zero-forex card). That is the number your account actually pays, and the one worth budgeting against.

The takeaway is not "cancel your tools." It is that a five or six tool dev stack costs 20 to 22% more than the sticker if you cannot reclaim GST, most of that is recoverable if you are registered and someone files it, and the forex slice is killable with the right card.

I priced every tool this way, including whether each one gives you a GST invoice you can reclaim against, and where an India-billed alternative actually exists.