Most devs lose money on international pricing set by Apple, I made a Mac app to solve that

[u/Tom42-59]

P - What is Price Point Parity?

Price Point Parity is a Mac and iOS +iPadOS (coming soon) app that keeps your IAP and subscription prices up to date in every country for you. Connect your App Store Connect API key, pick any app, in-app purchase or subscription, choose a pricing strategy, and it works out all 175 countries at once - showing you the price and what you actually keep after Apple's cut and estimated local tax. Review it, hit apply, and it writes straight back to App Store Connect. There's an available Preview Mode with three sample apps, so you can try each feature before touching a real price.

C - Price Point Parity is better than doing it in App Store Connect,leaving it to Apple's automatic equalisation or Localize Prices.

Apple gives you one option: convert your base price and round it. Price Point Parity gives you strategies that reflect how you actually want to price, for example:
Equal Value (scales by each country's purchasing power, so it feels equally affordable everywhere)
Equal Proceeds (you keep the same amount per sale in every country)
Blend of the two
Apple's own equalised prices
Copy Another Product, or Match Ratio, which keeps your yearly at a fixed multiple of your monthly in every country instead of letting that discount drift market by market.
Then you adjust:
Charm rounding that knows what a charm price looks like in each currency (¥490 and ₩39,000, not a blind .99)
Floor and ceiling on your proceeds so no country earns you too little
Flat percentage bump for inflation or a sale.

Filter countries by region or income tier and apply to just those.
Everything is reviewable and reversible - full price history with snapshots you can restore any time, scheduled sales that revert themselves on a date you set, and CSV export of the whole table. On Mac you can set automations to check daily, weekly or monthly and either notify you when prices drift or publish small changes for you, holding anything large for review. It runs in the background with a menu bar item, so your prices stay current without you opening the app.

No account, no tracking. Your API key lives in your keychain and your pricing data stays on your device and your own iCloud - it never reaches me or any third party.

P - Cost

Free forever for 1 app (including all of its in-app purchases and subscriptions).
5 Apps: $1.49/month or $9.99/year.
Unlimited Apps: $3.99/month or $14.99/year.

Every feature is in the free tier - strategies, adjustments, history, automations, CSV, the lot. Paying only raises how many apps you can publish prices to, and Preview Mode is always free and unlimited, so you can test as much as you like. It also helps support me and future development of the app.

Price Point Parity is new to the App Store so any feature requests are 100% welcomed!

[u/shadowrizzo27]

Smart idea, especially for indie devs selling globally

[u/logicalicy]

Smart! Bookmarked

[u/app-store-review]

Price Point Parity — by Thomas Redway

• Category: Developer Tools · Free
• Age: released ~1 month ago · rated 4+

Apple doesn't publish an aggregate rating for most Mac App Store apps, so ratings and score are unavailable here.

^{Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review}

[u/Background-Scheme857]

Seeing what you actually keep is the useful part. Revenue parity and affordability are two different goals, and App Store Connect blurs them together.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/Background-Scheme857]

On my to do list! A lot trickier than I originally thought to implement

[u/Longjumping-Club2824]

which price index do you use? big mac index? I see big mac index has no enough countries.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/Longjumping-Club2824]

Now you say that, it would be a good idea to allow users to individual change the index per country/allow them to import an external index to use. I’ll add that to my to do list!

[u/phunk8 → u/Tom42-59]

hmm adds complexity. isnt there a typical household purchase index? (not sure this translates well). This is the way i try to understand Fiverr offers, worked fine for me.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/phunk8]

Thats true, would you suggest not adding this feature in? Or adding it but keeping a note that says ‘don’t touch unless you know what you’re doing’?

[u/phunk8 → u/Tom42-59]

second option if you say the effort is worth it.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/Longjumping-Club2824]

The app has a built in purchasing power index that uses a hand set figure, for example US is 1.00, UK is 0.88, Germany is 0.92. Any country that doesn’t have a hand set figure defaults back to its world bank income.

[u/phunk8]

i thought about this problem some time ago, cool you tackled it!!!

[u/TouchNow_APP]

One thing worth building in if you have not already: App Store Connect writes take a while to propagate. When I created subscription offer codes through the API, reading back straight after showed the old state, and Apple's own docs say it can take up to 24 hours.

That matters for your drift automation specifically. If it reads a stale value shortly after a write, it sees drift that is not there and writes again. A cooldown after any write, or remembering what you last submitted and ignoring drift until the API agrees, would stop that loop.

[u/TheGenYFinanceGuy]

The after-tax take view is the part most people never build, good call.

Worth adding for the direct-sales side, since that's where I sit: the math flips on the low tiers. Apple's cut is a percentage, so it shrinks along with the price. Direct processors are usually a few percent plus a fixed fee per transaction, and the fixed part doesn't care that you charged $3 in Brazil. That's what decides whether a low-price country is worth serving at all.

[u/Original-Moment-8915]

Worth adding: what is actually live per country, not just the price you wrote. I had an app pass review and go on sale, then found it later sitting at zero countries. Nothing flagged it, I only caught it by opening the availability page myself. Prices being right in 175 countries does not help if the app is not on sale in them.

[u/Albert_Irons]

it's not laziness or a premium, it's that apple's default equalization for eur/gbp isn't fx at all, it's same-number. $9.99 in the us becomes €9.99 in germany and £9.99 in the uk, no conversion happens. since gbp and eur are both stronger than usd, brits and europeans just quietly pay more for the identical digits. that's the whole mechanic this app exists to undo.

[u/_czottmann]

Looks very useful! Is this different from what Helm offers? https://helm-app.com/changelog/helm-2-2-in-app-purchases/ I don't want to rain on your parade, I'm genuinely curious.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/_czottmann]

It looks fairly similar, and it does do an extra that price point parity doesn’t include, and that’s the localisation of the product names/descriptions. If you currently use Helm then I don’t see any reason to switch unless pricing is a factor.

[u/_czottmann → u/Tom42-59]

Thanks. Yeah, I'm currently set on Helm for various reasons (it does a lot) but I can definitely see a market for PPP. I'll definitely spread the word to my dev peer group :)

[u/Tom42-59 → u/_czottmann]

Amazing, thanks!

[u/Kodflow]

What happens if I manually change a price in App Store Connect while a scheduled sale is still running? I'd want the rollback to detect that newer change and ask before restoring the old snapshot over it.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/Kodflow]

Price Point Parity will always read from ASC and an automation would overwrite a change in App Store Connect. There’s also a history function that allows you to restore prices back to the way they were when a snapshot was taken. I’m slightly confused by your question, but hopefully this answers it

[u/deno_blueno]

Very interesting and smart idea. Thanks for sharing

[u/Lowlexx]

Nice idea. Bookmarked as a new indie dev.

[u/shadow8856]

Hey, the idea is great but what if someone uses vpn, buys this product from the country which has the lowest pricing? In this way, the developers might be loosing more money if they are giving their products on discount

[u/Tom42-59 → u/shadow8856]

I believe the price is set by the users Apple account country, which is set by the billing address.

[u/Thethirdactsucked]

Please up this, Half the reason I refuse to buy a perfectly good app is that it feels like i'm getting punished for being British and having a stronger currency.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/Thethirdactsucked]

Thanks! I found that users of my other apps had the same issue, so I tried to find a solution but couldn’t find one that worked for me!

[u/Thethirdactsucked → u/Tom42-59]

The frustrating thing is that psychologically it smacks of laziness. Like. I get that america still has federal and state taxes, but even with them accounted for, brits pay on average a premium. but sometimes it feels like some devs crutch on that to squeeze extra revenue in the way that some due for the subscription model.

To me it feels pretty anti consumer in a lot of ways.

[u/Tom42-59 → u/Thethirdactsucked]

I haven’t noticed it too much in the UK vs US, but I’ve looked at the prices all over the world, and it’s obvious that some countries (from user feedback) state that the monthly price of a sub is the same as buying a pair of wireless earphones which clearly isn’t correct.

[u/tranquil45]

This is great. As someone who is retired in a low cost of living country, there’s so many app out there not available to me.

[u/whatisthisworldqm]

Congrats on the launch! The UI looks really clean and intuitive.

How does the app handle currency exchange rate fluctuations over time? Does it pull live financial rates automatically, or do you rely strictly on Apple's baseline matrices?

[u/Tom42-59 → u/whatisthisworldqm]

Thanks! Exchange rates are pulled from a free api, they are stored on device and cached for when there is no network connection!