If your customers are in India, does the standard SaaS price ladder still work?
Genuine question, not a humble brag about our pricing.
Most pricing advice assumes a US or EU buyer. $29 a month feels unremarkable there. Converted, that is roughly Rs 2,600, and for an independent tutor here running 40 students out of a WhatsApp group that is a real monthly decision, not a rounding error. The product costs us the same to run either way.
We sell to Indian educators, and every option has a catch.
Flat global price. Simple and honest, and it prices out most of the market we actually built for.
Regional pricing. Works until someone with a VPN buys the cheap tier, and then your support queue fills with mismatched accounts.
Usage-based. Sounds fair, but for a teacher it turns a predictable bill into an anxious one, and anxiety about the bill is itself a reason to churn.
A free tier that is genuinely usable. Our current answer. It means a large share of users will never pay and we are betting on the ones who grow.
If you sell into India, Southeast Asia, LATAM or Africa: what did you actually land on, and what broke when you did? I am more interested in what failed than what worked.
Replies
Your 4th option is the one I use, and what broke for me wasn't the share of people who never pay. It was that the free tier never ran out.
My free allowance refills every month and it's sized so someone can do real work with it. A normal month fit inside the free amount, so paying was never the next step. Nobody said no to the price. The question just never came up.
So if you keep a usable free tier, I'd size it against what a typical tutor actually does in a month, not against what feels generous