news.ycombinator.com• Jul 18, 2022• 1 min read
Ask HN: How do you localize your prices?We recently released an online course. [1] It's $29, but we've had users saying, "I'm in ${country poorer than USA}, and I can't afford the $29. Do you offer regional pricing?"I would like to support this. The dollar-value to a customer in India is probably lower than in the USA.Most big platforms (Udemy, App Store, Play Store) seem to solve this with a price tier matrix. They maintain a big table of prices per (tier, currency). The tier comes from the product, and the currency comes from ... the user's IP address? (See example matrix [2])To build this from scratch, I would have to:* Define a list of tiers, each with a hard-coded USD price.* Maintain a list of Purchasing Power Parity multipliers for each currency. For example, regularly scrape OECD data.* To get a tier's price in currency X, multiply by the current PPP.* Somehow clamp the prices to "appealing" values, so we get e.g. £25 instead of £24.19.* Ensure we never make a loss after subtracting Stripe fees!* Detect a user's loca