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Comment by alandarev | Hacker News Reader

No its not. One does not include VAT, other does.

In Dropbox example both include VAT. You can see this tendency clearly in digital games. When I worked with games pricing for MacOS, I asked why such a huge difference? Boss replied: "It is the easiest to force Europeans into premium costs".

There is even a chrome extension which shows how much a game costs in different countries on Steam website:

Buy Sid Meier's Civilization V

US: $29.99 (18.04 GBP)

RU: 249 pуб. (4.01 GBP) (78% )

CIS: $14.99 USD (9.02 GBP) (50% )

BR: R$ 44,99 (12.11 GBP) (33% )

UK: £19.99 (11% )

EU: 29,99€ (23.7 GBP) (31% )

AU: $69.99 USD (42.11 GBP) (133% )

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Also not long time ago there was an article about Spotify pricing [1]. It simply is a many years ongoing Europe rip-off.

[1] - http://mts.io/projects/spotify-pricing/

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One of the neat things about this is that it sometimes produces arbitrage that people leverage if the game does not have geo-restrictions built in. People will purchase in bulk and then trade.

For services like Spotify you do have to account for different delivery costs they may have in Europe. Bandwidth is more expensive over here (partly because it just is, and partly because in many places we are not as well served so it is a more contended resource) which they will have to factor in.

There may be differing costs for payment processing too, and if they have any sort of tech support and documentation there will be larger internationalisation costs in Europe too.

These things are unlikely to explain all the difference (probably not even close to half of it) but we need to consider these thing to make sure we are being fair when shouting "rip off!".

> Bandwidth is more expensive over here

Do you have a source for that? According to this [1] Europe has by far the cheapest bandwidth in the world

  [1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world

Bandwidth is cheaper in Europe. See the Cloudflare article recently.

Also, regarding i18n for Europe: most of the time, it is localized only for FIGS (France, Italy, Germany, Spain). Other 20 or so (for EU, not Europe) countries get shown a finger. So why should they pay for that?

It would appear that my knowledge on relative bandwidth costs is either very out of date (or was just plain wrong to start with)...

On internationalisation: fair point on those that don't get the effort, though some effort being made is better than none.

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