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Comment by abelr | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your last point on feeling cheated, there are two aspects to it. Right now if you check the price of Slack with an indian IP, you will see $2.67 for the lower tier (6.67 for the US), Netflix will give wildly different prices per country [1], and Survey monkey gives me the same USD price in Euros. People expect to pay different prices in different countries.

The other aspect is to prevent a user from receiving different prices. To prevent that we do a few things. We remember the prices that were displayed to a user and can make sure an entire country gets the same prices during an experiment.

[1] https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netfl...

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I would be very worried about customers finding out that other people in the same country got offered different prices. Here's an example of a story from the Atlantic[1] that describes it in a very poor light. Making sure someone always gets the same price on refresh doesn't hold up if they are browsing at a friends house for example. I would be very worried about getting shunned for price discrimination.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-onl...

Then why does the airline industry thrive (recent events not included) with rampant price discrimination?

In my experience, airline “price optimization” is wildly overblown a boogeyman tale.

Airlines price classes of seats individually. If one is sold, the next user sees a different price. A rule based system is fairly common. They’re not using RL or dynamic pricing algorithms. In fact, I’d wager most don’t have the technical expertise or even data (with the rise of meta-search) to do so.

I can confirm that some customers are apparently very keenly aware of prices. I've recently been experimenting with my prices, and 2 days after lowering after going way too high, a customer sent me a message asking why they were paying more

I think then the best is to experience in the entire country at once. There is no need to only experiment on a small percentage of users.

> and Survey monkey gives me the same USD price in Euros.

European prices usually include VAT, while US prices don't include state taxes, since they are applied at checkout based on your location. That ends up being the same price in the end.

Just checked here from London, Survey Monkey's "Team Premier" prices are $75|£75|€75 per user per month [1]. I don't think the reason behind the price differences is whether they are VAT inclusive/exclusive?

[1] https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/pricing/?ut_source=homepage&u...

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