My lifetime plan was cheaper than my annual plan in 8 countries and Google never told me
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Hello everyone!
I run a small Android reminders app. For months the monthly plan had zero sales and I assumed nobody wanted to subscribe. Turns out Play Console converts each product's price to local currency on its own and never compares them against each other.
In 8 countries my lifetime purchase ended up cheaper than a full year of subscription. Nothing warns you. I fixed the price ladder so lifetime always costs more than a year, and the monthly plan sold for the first time.
The first renewal just came in too. Small numbers, but they went from zero to something.
If you sell in-app on Google Play: have you ever checked your regional prices side by side?
#pricing #android #indiehackers
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Good catch, and the mechanism is worth spelling out for anyone reading: Play converts each product on its own from your base price through its conversion table and rounds to local price points, so two products that sit close together in dollars can swap places in a currency where the rounding steps are coarse. Mine were all created by one script through the API, every product through the same conversion call at the same moment, which at least rules out the drift you get when products are set up months apart at different exchange rates. The other protection is distance: a week at 6.99 and a year at 49.99 are far enough apart that no rounding can flip them. The pairs that can flip are the close ones, a lifetime at roughly two years of subscription, a big credit pack against a month. If you have those, the side by side table is the only place you will see it, because the console shows one product at a time.