Indian developer says company made staff pay for AI tools, refused reimbursement; 'Expose them,' netizens say

An Indian Software Development Engineer (SDE) has drawn attention on social media after sharing their experience of working for a company that required employees to pay for artificial intelligence (AI) tools for office work without reimbursement. In a now-viral Reddit post titled “Feeling the burn of AI in a weird way at my workplace”, the employee questioned whether the company’s actions amounted to “employee extortion.”

What happened at the workplace?

The SDE explained, “I am working as an SDE in a product-based startup. Recently, they came to know about Cursor IDE and they have been nagging us for some time to write unit tests on our codebase. They figured the developers can quickly use Cursor to write the test cases and reach an 80 per cent coverage.”

Initially, developers were asked to pay $20 per month for two months from their own pockets, with the promise that the company would reimburse them later. However, when employees requested repayment, management changed its stance.

“When people started to raise reimbursement requests to the accounts team, the management suddenly stops it and adds a condition, every developer needs to provide a report on how he used Cursor and how many unit tests he wrote and what was his contribution to the coverage number, the reimbursement will not happen for the individuals who don't submit the data or if they are not able to justify their use,” the employee said.

“So essentially we are being forced to purchase the subscription from our pockets, use it for company work, beg for reimbursement for something which they asked us to spend on them.”

How did social media react?

The post quickly gained traction, with users expressing empathy and offering suggestions.

“I feel genuinely sorry for you. It baffles me how easily the founders/employers get away with these things,” wrote one user. Another added, “What kinda company is this? It's really weird to ask employees to purchase something that the company requires from their own pocket and then make them beg for reimbursement.”

Some users also offered practical solutions. “This is clearly wrong. But I can help you out. Try using Gemini CLI, it's an agentic AI tool that runs in terminal, reads and writes in your project files, and its free quota should be sufficient,” one suggested. Another advised, “If they can't reimburse the request just apply for sick leave for 1 or 2 days for chilling and relaxing. Find out ways to decrease your productivity so that you can get your time back instead of focusing on money lost.”

Another wrote: “Expose them."