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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the US has really cheap pricing compared to Western Europe, especially when you consider the poorer countries such as Portugal, Italy, Spain etc.

I wonder if they can get away charging higher prices in these countries because chess is more popular there.

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It looks worse than it is, because:

1. US prices don't include sales tax.

2. All prices are shown in USD, which has fallen ~12% in the last few months.

Adjust for both of these and Western Europe gets the plans for 20% cheaper.

The sales tax is a fair point, but not the currency one. American companies are extremely quick to increase the Euro-denominated prices when this currency becomes weaker; six months would have been more than enough to perform the opposite adjustment. Anyway I can see how selling in the Europe has more friction (legal risks, costs of translations etc.), which must somehow be compensated.

Isn't it the case that US prices are without sales tax, whereas all EU/UK prices are inclusive of tax by law?

Makes me wonder if the author tried different states/providences to see if they have multiple prices per country.

I checked several states from the US and some from other countries. I did not find any discrepancies within a country but I didn't check every combination of course!

In the US at least sales tax is only going to show up on the final checkout page, so this dataset won't have it.

Yes as the sales tax rules vary from state to state. The interesting thing is historically I think sales tax was only for physical goods if you download the software there is no sales tax but if you get a physical CD then its taxed. Some states have modified the laws but many like California still don't tax downloaded software.

For what it's worth VAT isn't uniform across the EU either. IIRC the EU specifies minimums, but countries are allowed higher rates and can manage their own exclusions too.

It can get even more complicated here because you can have a county and/or city sales tax add-on so sales tax can vary from city to city.. Doesn't matter to much until you get into big purchases like cars that people starting buying cars in the lowest tax cities. So then the state starting requiring that the tax to be calculated to the address where you are registered.

Great observation! This is definitely something they do. India is a good example where the price should be lower based on purchasing power, but it’s been increased since chess is really popular there and they can make more overall profit by increasing the membership price.

... low pricing

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