I could confirm the answer for 120 dollar-billed tools. Eight of them issue an Indian GST invoice. The other 112 do not.

That number bothered me enough to go figure out why, because at first it reads like a catalogue of vendors being sloppy about India. It isn't. The missing invoice is not an oversight. It is written into how the tax works, and once you see it, a specific and recoverable amount of money falls out of the gap.

The reason 93% of them don't invoice you

When a foreign company sells you software, India's GST rules split into two worlds depending on who you are.

If you are an individual or an unregistered business with no GSTIN, you fall under the OIDAR rules. The overseas vendor is supposed to register in India and charge you 18% GST at checkout. Some of the big ones do, which is why you occasionally see GST on an Adobe or a Microsoft receipt. Plenty of smaller tools quietly don't, which is a grey area nobody enforces.

If you are a registered business, and most companies past a modest turnover are, none of that applies. Your purchase is an import of a service, and it moves to the Reverse Charge Mechanism. The vendor is explicitly not meant to charge you Indian GST or register for you. Instead the law hands the whole obligation to you: you self-account for the 18% IGST, you pay it, and you claim it back.

So the foreign vendor has no reason, and often no legal basis, to give you an Indian GST invoice. The 93% is not vendors ignoring India. It is the tax system deciding that the paperwork is your job, not theirs. The eight that do issue one are mostly the large players who registered here for their consumer business and never turned it off for B2B.

This matters because of what most finance teams do next, which is nothing.

The part that actually costs money

Reverse charge is not optional. That is the sentence I wish someone had put in front of me earlier.

People hear "you claim the GST back" and assume the worst case is a wash. It isn't. Under reverse charge you are legally the one who owes the 18% to the government on that foreign subscription. You raise a self-invoice for the import (the vendor gives you none, so you generate the document yourself), you declare and pay the IGST in your monthly GSTR-3B, and in that same return you claim the identical amount as input tax credit. Filed correctly, month after month, it nets to zero.

Skip it, and you have not saved anything. You have created a liability. The tax was due whether or not you filed it, so an audit can come back for the unpaid IGST plus interest, and separately you have forfeited the input credit you were entitled to. It is the rare case where doing nothing is worse than doing it right and worse than not buying the tool at all.

The trap is that this looks invisible on a bank statement. Your card gets charged $250, the money leaves, the tool works. There is no invoice arriving in your inbox to trigger the accounting entry, because the vendor never sends one. Unless someone on your side is specifically treating foreign software as an import of service and generating the self-invoice, the whole reverse-charge cycle silently doesn't happen. For a lot of startups it doesn't, because the CA is applying reverse charge to obvious things like import of goods and freight, and a Figma subscription doesn't look like an import to anyone.

That is 18% of your entire foreign software spend, sitting in a state where it is either an unclaimed credit or an open liability, depending on how unlucky you get.

What the two prices actually are

Once you fold in the card forex markup as well, the same tool has two honest prices in India, and they are far apart.

A registered business that files reverse charge properly pays about 3.5% over the mid-market sticker. That 3.5% is the card's currency-conversion markup, which nobody gets back, and 18% GST is even charged on the markup itself. Small, annoying, unavoidable.

A business that cannot reclaim the GST, or simply doesn't, pays about 22% over the sticker once the full 18% lands on top of the forex.

The 22% is the number to sit with. On a foreign software line of a few lakhs a year, that is tens of thousands of rupees that bought nothing. It is forex plus a tax you were carrying without knowing it.

The premium is ugliest on the usage-billed tools, because there the percentage rides on top of a bill that scales with your traffic. In our numbers the worst monthly gaps were exactly those: a large WooCommerce setup, PostHog, Mixpanel. A flat $10 seat is a rounding error. A metered analytics or e-commerce bill at scale is where the India tax quietly turns into real money.

The forex line, since we're here

Two specific things, because they are cheap wins and almost nobody uses them.

Most credit cards charge a cross-currency markup of 1.5% to 3.5% on foreign transactions. Several Indian banks and fintechs now issue zero-forex-markup cards. If your dollar spend runs into lakhs, moving those charges to a zero-forex card removes that slice entirely, and it applies to every foreign charge you will ever make, not only software.

The second one catches people at checkout. If a foreign vendor's payment screen offers to bill you in INR instead of its own currency, decline it. That is dynamic currency conversion, and the rate baked in is reliably worse than letting your own card do the conversion. Always pay in the vendor's currency.

What I'd actually do with this

If you are registered, the highest-value action on this entire list is a single conversation with whoever does your GST returns: "are we applying reverse charge and claiming input tax credit on our foreign software subscriptions, with self-invoices?" If the answer is a pause, you have found the money. It is procedural, not clever, and it recovers 18% of a spend you were treating as sunk. I am a developer, not a chartered accountant, so pin the exact mechanics to your own situation, but that is the question that pays for itself.

If you are not registered and your foreign SaaS spend is meaningful, the reclaimable 18% is a real part of the case for registering, sitting next to whatever else pushes you over the line.

And whichever you are, budget the real number, not the sticker. A foreign SaaS pricing page is written for an American buyer. For an Indian business it is missing a forex layer and a tax layer, and the vendor has no incentive to add them for you.

I priced every foreign tool in our catalogue this way, including which of them actually issue a GST invoice you can reclaim against, and where an India-billed alternative exists that skips the forex layer entirely. The invoice check was the one that surprised me. Eight out of a hundred and twenty.

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.