Why Coherence costs less in India, Brazil, and 60+ other countries

Bottom Line Up Front: Starting today, Coherence customers in 60+ countries see automatic regional pricing — Pro at $18/mo instead of $29 in mid-income markets, $12/mo in lower-income markets. Eligibility is determined by your card-issuing country, not your IP, so VPNs don't shift you between tiers. Stripe Adaptive Pricing handles local currency at checkout — Indian customers see their tier's price in rupees, Brazilians in reais, Germans in euros.

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Why we did this#

We're early. We don't have a long enough paid history to point at "international conversion was X% lower" data — we're launching this before we have a customer base, not after.

The directional case didn't need that data. A meaningful share of /pricing visitors are from outside the US, and $29/mo occupies a very different share of monthly income depending on where someone lives. Software like ours should be evaluated by people on the basis of whether it's useful, not whether they can stomach the price tag at the front door. Removing that barrier now, before we have any paid customers anchored to US pricing, costs us nothing — and might bring in real users who would have bounced from a price tag built for the US market.

The practice has a name — purchasing-power-parity pricing (PPP) — and a long history in software. JetBrains has been doing region-aware pricing for years, and a whole ecosystem of services like ParityDeals exists specifically to help SaaS companies implement it. The basic idea: charge less in countries where median income is lower, so the product remains affordable relative to what people actually earn.

PPP pricing has a real downside — you give up revenue from international customers who could have paid full price. We're betting that, at our stage, the gain in reach outweighs the per-customer discount. If we look back in twelve months and the math is wrong, we'll revisit the multipliers.

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The tiers#

Three tiers, no country-by-country variation:

(All tiers round up to the nearest whole dollar. So 0.60x of $29 is $17.40, and we charge $18.)

Here's the full list as it stands today:

Tier 2 (40% off): Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Albania, Turkey, Malaysia, Thailand, China, South Africa.

Tier 3 (60% off): India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador.

If your country isn't on either list, you're on Tier 1. We picked the country lists by looking at World Bank income classifications, not by trying to be perfectly fair to every individual country — there's a reasonable case that some Tier 1 countries should drop to Tier 2, or that the Caribbean and Central Asia should be on the list at all. We'd rather ship something good than nothing while we wait for the perfect mapping. If you're somewhere we got wrong, tell us and we'll look at it.

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How eligibility actually works#

The naive way to do regional pricing is by IP address. The problem: a $5/month VPN gives anyone, anywhere, a discount. So the discount stops being a discount and just becomes the new price.

We use the country that issued your payment card, surfaced by Stripe at checkout. A US-issued Visa is Tier 1 even if you're using it from Bangkok. An Indian-issued debit card is Tier 3 even if you're traveling in London. This isn't perfect — someone with a US bank account who lives in India full-time will pay the US price — but it's reasonably hard to game without actually having a relationship with a foreign bank, which is the line we want to draw.

The marketing /pricing page uses IP to guess your tier and show you the right discount preview. The actual price you pay at checkout is determined by your card. If those disagree (you're traveling, or your IP and card disagree for any reason), the card wins.

We also lock the tier at first paid checkout. If you start on Tier 3 with an Indian card and later swap to a US card, you stay on Tier 3 — switching tiers requires a support email and an eligibility check. Otherwise the system is too easy to manipulate by temporarily holding a card from a cheaper country.

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Local currency at checkout#

This part isn't unique to PPP — it's how all our customers should have been seeing prices already. We turned on Stripe Adaptive Pricing as part of the same release.

What this means in practice: an Indian customer hitting checkout sees their Pro plan price in rupees (their card's local currency), not "$12 USD." A Brazilian sees reais. A German sees euros. The underlying price stays in USD on our end, Stripe handles the FX conversion at the live rate, and we still settle to USD in our bank.

Stripe takes a 1% currency-conversion fee for this, on top of normal processing. We could have avoided that fee by charging everyone in USD and letting their card issuer handle the conversion. But the customer experience is meaningfully worse — "$12.00 USD" feels foreign in a way that the same number in local currency doesn't, even when the amounts are equivalent. We think the 1% fee buys real conversion lift, especially in markets where USD pricing is the cultural marker for "expensive Western SaaS."

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The pieces that make this work#

For anyone curious about the implementation:

• Country capture: Stripe webhook reads payment_method.card.country on first paid subscription event and writes it to the account. That field is the source of truth for tier eligibility going forward.
• Tier resolver: a small lookup function maps ISO-3166 alpha-2 country codes to one of three tiers, with Tier 1 as the default for anything unmapped.
• Stripe prices: each plan has three price IDs in Stripe, one per tier. Checkout session creation looks up the right price ID based on the customer's tier.
• Webhook reverse-mapping: when subscription events come in, the price ID is mapped back to a plan slug — so the rest of the system doesn't need to know about tiers at all.
• Marketing page: server-rendered with geoip-lite for the IP-based country hint (DigitalOcean App Platform doesn't forward Cloudflare's CF-IPCountry header, so we do the lookup in-app).

If you're a SaaS founder considering doing this yourself, the load-bearing decision is card country, not IP — that's what makes the discount actually defensible. Everything else is plumbing.

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What's next#

We'll watch what happens to international conversion over the next couple of months. If the lift is what we expect, we'll probably:

• Refine the country list (some Eastern European and Latin American countries are borderline between tiers)
• Look at whether annual pricing should have a deeper regional discount than monthly
• Consider per-user-tier discounts for educational and nonprofit accounts on top of the country tier

If you have feedback on any of this — your country should be on a different tier, you'd like a different model, you think the discounts are too steep or not steep enough — [email protected]. We'll read it.

If you're somewhere this matters and you've been on the fence about Coherence: now's a good time to try it. Free plan stays free, and the paid plans now match what they should cost where you live.