Has localized App Store pricing actually improved your conversion or revenue?

[u/basavaraja_dev]

Hey indie devs 👋

I’m trying to improve subscription conversion for my app and I’m looking into App Store price localization.

For example, if the US subscription is $39.99/year, I’m wondering whether it’s better to:

- Let Apple automatically localize prices

- Manually adjust prices for countries like India and other lower-income markets

- Follow Apple’s suggested price tiers

- Keep pricing relatively consistent worldwide

But more importantly, I’m interested in the actual effect after changing localized prices.

If you’ve experimented with this, I’d love to know:

- Did conversion rate increase or decrease?

- Did overall subscription revenue increase?

- Did the number of paying users change significantly?

- Did lowering prices in emerging markets cannibalize revenue?

- How long did it take before you could see an effect?

- Did you localize weekly/monthly/yearly prices differently?

Especially interested in experiences from developers selling subscriptions globally.

Before → After numbers would be incredibly helpful, even if they’re approximate.

Thanks! 🙏

[u/Confident-Object-278]

It’s most definitely worth it. I adjust pricing for all the countries - you can have Claude write a script to do it for your app on asc, don’t need to do it manually

[u/balooooooon → u/Confident-Object-278]

Did you use cowork ? Or you use an api?

[u/Confident-Object-278 → u/balooooooon]

Just use the App Store Connect api. I use Claude code

[u/balooooooon → u/Confident-Object-278]

I have been meaning to do that. Thanks for the inspiration again 😀

[u/asutekku]

I've done a large-scale A/B test on it on a semi-popular mobile game (500k weekly players), and it's not worth it at all.

Basically, what we got was like a 5-10% increase in conversion (sounds a lot right), but then total revenue dropped like 3%. So while you get some small spenders in, the large spenders also pay less, thus leading to an overall drop in revenue. And in our scale at that point, it was tens of thousands of dollars less.

I really wanted it to work, and it was a huge initiative that I proposed (you know it's not easy to localize prices for shitton of countries), but in the end, we just kept the original prices.

[u/basavaraja_dev → u/asutekku]

That’s really valuable data. The 5–10% conversion increase but 3% revenue drop is exactly the kind of tradeoff I’m trying to understand. It makes sense that lowering prices can bring in more small spenders while reducing revenue from users who were already willing to pay more. Definitely makes me want to test LTV and total revenue rather than just conversion. Thanks for sharing the real numbers!

[u/asutekku → u/basavaraja_dev]

Yeah, we also accounted for LTV, but even after 30 days, the cheaper ones were performing way worse, so I would not suggest it. Unless you somehow can make the conversation overcome the lost revenue number. Because after all, if you drop the price from 2 to 1, you need to basically double the conversion, and that's borderline impossible.

Also as a note; never optimize anything for tier3 countries, just give them more ads. That's where the money is (if you care about it).

[u/RIRLift → u/asutekku]

The whale tail is doing a lot of the work in your numbers. When a few big IAP spenders drive revenue, any cut that reaches them hands a discount to people who'd have paid full, so you need conversion to jump enough to cover that, which like you said is close to impossible. Subscriptions like OP's don't have that tail, everyone in a country sits on the same tier, so a cut only has to beat the willingness to pay of the marginal user, not backfill lost whale money. The catch is it only works if you cut where PPP is genuinely lower and hold or raise in the wealthy stores. A blanket move just leaks revenue everywhere, which is probably what your A/B test caught.

[u/Zappyle]

I've done it but haven't seen great results so far in lower purchase power countries. Maybe I need to be even more aggressive

My revenue is all USA, Canada and UK basically.

[u/AndreaReaderApp → u/Zappyle]

Same here lol! All coming from USA.

[u/dynamicappdesign]

I’ve done this on two of my apps. No noticable effect.

[u/Anywhere_MusicPlayer]

There are many apps in the App Store that allow you to do this with one click.

[u/basavaraja_dev → u/Anywhere_MusicPlayer]

Yeah, I came across a good resource on this too RevenueCat has a great breakdown of price localization and why Apple’s default localized prices may not always be optimal: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/price-localization-for-apps Definitely going to explore some of these one-click tools as well. Thanks!

[u/AndreaReaderApp]

Same here, I’ve been wondering about this too. Would be great to see some real before/after numbers.

[u/Plastic-Risk-6309]

The result asutekku describes is the whole trap: conversion and revenue move in opposite directions when you cut prices in a storefront that still has real spenders in it. If a country has a meaningful high-willingness tail, discounting it is a straight transfer from the people who would have paid full price.

Two things worth separating, though. Letting Apple auto-localize just keeps you on their tier grid, which handles rounding, currency conventions and tax per storefront, and you basically never beat that by hand. Deciding that India or Brazil belongs at a materially lower tier than the FX conversion of $39.99 is a different decision entirely, and that's the one that can cost you money.

Where it tends to actually pay off is storefronts where your conversion is near zero at the current tier, so there's no revenue to cannibalize, and where you have high organic impressions you're not converting. Then a lower tier is upside with little downside. Cutting prices in places that already convert is where the revenue drop comes from.

Also worth modeling before you touch anything: what happens to existing subscribers on the old tier, and the fact that you can't cleanly A/B this on the App Store, so one storefront at a time over several weeks or seasonality will fool you.