Why parity pricing exploded this indie dev's app sales
If you charge one price everywhere, you're quietly telling most of the planet not to buy.
A $9.99 subscription is a coffee in San Francisco. In Lagos, Jakarta or Karachi, it's a serious chunk of a day's wage. So people in those countries reach your paywall, see a number that's absurd where they live, and leave, not because they don't want your app, but because the price was never meant for them.
Parity pricing fixes that. You charge less where money buys more, so the sacrifice feels roughly the same everywhere. It's not charity, and it's not a fire sale. It's meeting each market at a price it can actually pay.
The evidence
Viktor Seraleev is an indie developer with a portfolio of small iOS and Android apps. In late 2025 he ran a pricing experiment on one of them, CollageKit: he lowered prices across several countries, anchoring on a reference price index, then pushing prices even lower in the poorest markets.
Then he waited. A few days later, purchases started arriving from places he'd never sold to. Here's his own recap:
Viktor Seraleev@seraleevPurchases began coming in from countries where I've never had a paying user before: Nigeria, the Philippines, Pakistan… After a few weeks, daily revenue had doubled, and MRR was up by more than $2,000.
View post on X →Those users were always there. The price was the wall.
Seraleev had heard the classic objection ("people in those countries don't pay") and tested it anyway. The data disagreed. (He also raises a smart caveat we'll come back to: don't price too low, everywhere.)
Why it works
You unlock demand that was simply priced out. Willingness to pay isn't a fixed dollar number. It scales with local incomes. Drop the price to a locally-sane level and a slice of people who would never have paid suddenly convert. You're not cannibalizing full-price sales; those buyers were never going to pay $9.99.
Small numbers, many markets, real totals. A few hundred extra dollars a month from a dozen emerging markets compounds, and it's revenue you were leaving on the table for free.
The downside is small on mobile. The usual fear is arbitrage: rich users VPN-ing into cheap regions. On the App Store and Play Store that's hard: purchases are tied to your account's store region, and switching is high-friction. The web has this problem far worse than mobile does.
The one guardrail
Seraleev's own warning is worth repeating: don't price too low across the board. A suspiciously cheap price can cheapen how people perceive your product: "if it's that cheap, is it any good?" Parity isn't "cheap everywhere." It's the right price for each place: full price where people can pay it, lower where they can't, and occasionally higher (some countries genuinely pay more than the US).
That's the difference between a discount and a strategy.
How to actually do it
You need three things per country: a measure of local purchasing power, your base price, and the store's allowed price points. The purchasing-power part is the tricky one, and it's where the Burger Index comes in. A burger is a little basket of local rent, wages and ingredients, so its price is a rough-but-honest gauge of what money is worth in a given country. Cheap burger, cheap country, lower app price.
That's exactly what this site automates. Enter your base price, choose how aggressive you want to be, capped-and-safe or Seraleev-style deep into emerging markets, and get recommended prices for 70+ countries, already rounded to real store tiers.
Try the calculator → It's free, no account. Then do what Seraleev did: ship it as a starting point, and watch where the new buyers come from.