How to price your app for international markets

The App Store’s default price converter uses the exchange rate, not what a market can actually pay. Those are not the same number, and the gap between them is where a lot of international revenue quietly goes missing.

What the store does automatically

Set a price in App Store Connect for one storefront, and Apple generates comparable prices across the other 174 storefronts and 43 currencies for you. That conversion accounts for current foreign exchange rates and applicable local taxes. It does not account for what someone in that country can actually afford, because exchange rate and purchasing power are different measurements that happen to share a currency symbol.

Exchange rate versus purchasing power

A $19.99 price converted at the nominal exchange rate lands close to ₹1,900 in India. A price calibrated to what that $19.99 is actually worth to a local buyer, the kind of purchasing-power-adjusted figure economists use to compare living costs across countries, is commonly estimated closer to ₹650 to ₹700, roughly a third of the auto-converted price. That is an industry estimate rather than an Apple-published figure, but the direction of the gap is not in dispute: the default conversion is priced for a market with dollar-level purchasing power, applied to one that does not have it.

What the market actually charges, not a formula

An index built from GDP per capita produces a confident number nobody can check, applied uniformly to every app regardless of its actual audience. A more grounded starting point is what competitors already selling into that storefront charge, since each of those prices is a decision a real company already made and is still living with. Here is Calm’s published annual subscription, converted to dollars at that day’s rate, across the eight storefronts this site collects daily:

Every one of those is a high-income market, and the same subscription still ranges from 72% to 100% of the US price. Italy is the one worth staring at: 49.99 euro against 64.99 in Germany, France and Spain, for the same product in the same currency. Nothing about an exchange rate explains that. It is a decision somebody made about one market.

A starting rule of thumb, and why it is only a starting point

Teams that do localise commonly price the most price-sensitive markets, India, Brazil and Türkiye among them, somewhere between 20% and 60% of their Tier 1 price, then round to the nearest price point the platform actually offers rather than an arbitrary number. Apple alone supports up to 800 price points per app, with 100 more available on request, so the rounding step rarely forces a large compromise.

A currency detail worth checking once

Apple and Google do not always bill in the same currency for the same territory. It is a small enough list of countries that most teams never notice until a support ticket about a price mismatch arrives, which is the wrong way to find out.

The practical version

Blog · Free ASO tools · Products · AsoTheory