My lifetime purchase was cheaper than my annual subscription in 8 countries and I had no idea

Last week I got a new purchase notification for one of my Android apps. Nothing unusual, except the amount looked lower than it should have been.

I went digging and found this: in India, my lifetime purchase was priced at 290 INR, while my annual subscription was at 450 INR. Buying forever was cheaper than buying one year.

It wasn't just India. Same inversion in Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, the Philippines and Nigeria. Eight markets where the pricing ladder was upside down.

Why it happened: Google converts your base USD price into local currency separately for each product. I set up the subscription months after the one-time purchase, so each got its own conversion pass. In the US and Europe the ratio stayed healthy (~1.7x). In emerging markets it flipped.

What it cost me: every user in those countries who compared both options was rationally choosing the cheaper one. Which happened to be the one that pays me once instead of every year.

The part that bothers me is that nothing in the Console flags this. The two products live on separate screens and nobody cross-checks them for you. I only caught it because one number looked off.

If you sell in multiple regions with more than one product, it's worth pulling both price tables side by side. Took me ten minutes and I would never have looked otherwise.

Has anyone else found pricing issues that only show up when you compare products against each other, rather than looking at each one on its own?