Regional pricing tiers for the App Store: how to build a ladder

Why not just use Apple's equalized prices?

Apple's default is to equalize your base price into every storefront: the same price, converted at Apple's rate, adjusted for local tax and rounded to a price point. That is a fair starting point, but it ignores the one thing that differs most between countries — what people can afford. A $4.99 utility is an impulse buy in Zürich and a considered purchase in Lagos. Pricing the whole world at US parity usually means leaving volume on the table in lower-income markets and, in a few high-income ones, leaving money on the table too.

What a tier ladder looks like

A ladder is a short list of tiers, each with a percentage of the base price, plus an assignment of every storefront to exactly one tier. Four tiers is a sensible default:

Percentages apply to your base currency before conversion. The computed local price is then snapped to the nearest price point Apple offers in that storefront, so '75 % of $4.99' becomes a real, tax-inclusive local price rather than an awkward decimal. Any single storefront can still carry an override — a fixed price that ignores its tier — which is how you handle a market you know well.

Where do the percentages come from?

There is no single right ladder; there are signals. Three are worth knowing because they are public and updated regularly:

• The Economist's Big Mac index — the price of a Big Mac in local currency divided by its US price. A purchasing-power proxy: Switzerland and Norway sit above the US, India and Indonesia well below.
• Netflix's Standard plan — how one of the world's largest subscription businesses prices the same product country by country, relative to the US.
• Spotify Premium Individual — the same idea for a different product and a different company, with a ladder that reaches lower in emerging markets.

RepriceCat ships these as one-click presets next to its own default ladder and 'Apple default' (keep Apple's equalized prices everywhere). Load one, then move storefronts between tiers by dragging them — the preset is a starting point, not a rule.

Practical rules of thumb

• Start with fewer tiers than you think. Four tiers cover most of the variance; eight tiers mostly add maintenance.
• Do not chase exchange rates. A tier is a strategic percentage, not a conversion; let Apple's price points absorb small currency moves.
• Revisit the ladder, not the prices. When you change Tier 3 from 50 % to 45 %, every product that uses it should follow — that is what a tier is for.
• Keep the storefronts where you actually have users at the top of your attention. The long tail can safely follow a preset.
• Apply one ladder to apps, in-app purchases and subscriptions alike, so the relative price of your premium tier stays the same everywhere.

How this works in RepriceCat

The Tiers page holds one set of tiers per account: name, percentage, and a drag-and-drop board of all 175 storefronts. Every product on the Apps page uses that set. Type a base price in your base territory (USD by default — any currency works), and the review table lists each storefront with its tier, the computed price, the snapped price point and a flag when the two differ. Confirm, and the batch is applied through the App Store Connect API; the change is logged per territory and can be exported.