Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products?

apmcommunication.com

6 pointspingananth13 comments

I sell a niche educational tool for technical leads($19 one-time access).

I get decent traffic from India/Southeast Asia, but 0 sales.

I’ve read conflicting advice:

The "SaaS" View: Don't lower prices; filter for high-value customers.

The "Game/Ebook" View: Lower prices significantly (60%+) to match local purchasing power, because zero marginal cost = free money.

Since my product has no server upkeep (it's just a Next.js app), I just enabled aggressive PPP.

Has anyone here successfully monetized a one-time purchase dev tool in India? Or is the "Free or Nothing" culture too strong?

I have had numerous enquirers from India but no sales, it was such a waste of time that I geoblocked the whole region.

Oh, was it subscription and high ticket value?

Optionally perpetual or subscription, niche software, B2B, more expensive than mass market / commodity software. Nonstop lying / scamming behavior.

You get funny things that happen like when a rep from a company will call you and warn you not to do a deal with another rep from the same company, then 2 hours later we get a call from the other rep.

I’m eventually going to go subscription only, people from Asia tend to really hate that and refuse to pay for subscriptions but we make so little money from them that it’s not worth catering to them, we’re better off dropping that entire region.

That sounds very draining.

Since I'm selling a low-ticket ($19) self-serve product with zero sales calls, I'm hoping i don't face this.

But I hear you loud and clear - if I ever move upmarket to enterprise contracts, I'll consider this!

This is going to be very personal opinion but I’ve bought many digital products when I’m either not thinking too much about the price or find that it has a much cheaper Indian version. Many times, have I done it just so I could help out another founder.

The most recent one I remember was some tool (Show HN) that searches the Mac with a local AI. I’m yet to start using it. I like the idea, and I might use it someday. It was beta-discounted

I’m from India.

Appreciate the honest perspective! As a founder from India myself, I’ve definitely bought tools just to support the maker. I’ve set the PPP price to ₹999 to make it a 'no-brainer' for folks here. Glad to know I'm on the right track.

SaaS software is not generally zero marginal cost since you run the infra, have support, etc, but maybe in your situation is close to zero since its very simple.

If you have no sales, but your costs are very low, you should try it.

The main reason not to would be costs or cannibalizing your higher value customers (which you don't have).

You are right! My costs are negligible and I just shipped the parity pricing feature hoping to do more sales as currently the count is less from these regions.

Most SaaS products have close to zero marginal cost, since marginal cost is the additional cost of taking on one more customer. If you already have a thousand customers, what does customer number 1001 actually cost? In most cases, you do not need more infrastructure and you do not need more developers. Maybe you need a bit more support time to answer a few extra emails or take a few more calls, but that is usually it.

There are exceptions. Some SaaS products have infrastructure costs that scale linearly per customer, for example if you spin up a separate database for each tenant. Others are very hands-on, where a large part of the cost is human support or service work, so each new customer does add real cost.

But for the vast majority of self-serve SaaS products, the cost of adding one more customer is effectively near zero in the context of the overall business.

I don't really know what sorts of scale you've worked on, but software operating costs growing roughly linearly is pretty normal.

You need to process X% more requests, you need X% more machines.

You need to store X% more data, you need to buy that much more disk, etc.

Many things scale worse than linearly too.

If your SaaS product doesn't do very much, sure, the costs might be cheap, but plenty of SaaS products just do a lot, processing lots of data for customers.

Datadog it a canonical example of an excellent software business, but even still, they have real infra costs because there's just a lot of data to process.

We do PPP for Caido in India and Brazil but for subscription. Brazil definitely worth it, India not so much.

For our voucher system we decided to not do PPP otherwise you need some kind of geoblock ala Steam to avoid code reselling.

Thanks for the heads up on the code reselling risk. That was my biggest worry with generic coupon codes too.

To solve this, I decided against just using a 'coupon' on the main checkout. Instead, I set up a completely separate payment flow (Topmate) specifically for India that requires local UPI payment methods.

My theory is that the requirement to use a local Indian payment method acts as a 'natural geoblock' against arbitrage. Interesting to hear that India didn't convert well for you even with PPP—I'll keep my expectations in check.

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