💳 FEATURE: Purchasing Power Parity / P.P.P. 🌎

[robin-macpherson]

Perceived Problem

• Many of our users may be located in countries where the economy/currency is not as strong against the US Dollar which our pricing is based on.
• This means that, although our pricing is intended to be very affordable, it may be totally unrealistic for users located on those places.
• This gives them an unfair disadvantage in being able to use our Premium features, and also potentially excludes a large Premium customer base.

Ideas / Proposed Solution(s)

• Let's implement Purchasing Power Parity (or PPP) - where we will offer a cheaper subscription price to users located in places where the currency and therefore purchasing power is not as strong against the USD.
• This should be somewhat proportional to that country's economic situation, i.e. it shouldn't necessarily just be one discounted price for all countries that quality.

Determining The Price

• We have a few interesting options for deciding on the price:
  • We can come up with the number ourselves by reaching out to users in each country, where possible, and asking what a reasonable price might be.
  • Big Mac Index - based on how much a Big Mac is in each country
  • Spotify Pricing in different countries
  • PPP Data from World Bank

I think the Big Mac Index is quite fun and also our subscription price is, rather comically, pretty close to the price of a Big Mac, so that could be a 1-1 match we can use? I also think we could potentially use the Spotify as a good measure and simply charge 50% of what they do for each country, since I think our subscription price is 1/2 of theirs in the US and UK.

Detecting The Country

• We should be able to inspect the header on each request for IP Geolocation
• We can use this to conditionally display a coupon code banner when visiting Journaly from a supported country, as well as when validating the coupon against the requesting country.

Some Open Questions

• Should this be opt-in? So that if some people live in those places and have plenty of money/want to pay the full price, they can?
• Are people going to cheat the system?
  • Maybe, but I don't think it's a big deal. Let's give people the benefit of the doubt that most are good folks who either want to support us or genuinely want the value of Premium, and trust that even in terms of the business/revenue side of things, we'll gain more from opening up the product to a wider market than how much we lose from a few people trying to get a discount.