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Comment by chton | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't just paying more. I'm aware of how tax-heavy europe is, and how much harder it is to support the wide variety of languages and laws. In most cases, I would be fine paying a bit more for a service.

The problem is the way the mark-up happens. They're not calculating the difference and marking that up, they're literally just equating US dollars with euros. $99 and €99 might sound similar, but the difference is over 30%. There is no way the additional support costs run that high, so it comes across as just an attempt to pull a fast one on europeans.

I'm sure if they did a proper calculation and gave a realistic number, nobody would complain about the increased cost.

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Netflix and Spotify are the same. Spotify is £9.99 here in the UK, €9.99 in most of Western Europe and $9.99 in the US. Admittedly they have to deal with record labels so it's a bit different, but it's not really an excuse.

Strangely Dropbox here is showing the price as $9.99.

In Poland Spotify costs ~20zł which is just a little bit under 7$. So not always it's so bad

Who is to say they didn't do a "proper calculation" and result in something close enough to €99 that they just rounded up/down to keep things consistent?

That's ofcourse possible, but there are many many services that pull this trick, and I would be surprised if dropbox was the only one that did the honorable thing here. And even if that's what they're doing, they should realize it gives a very bad impression and maybe round up/down to a different price. Literally anything else would be better.

India as 37 languages and a mess of a country, I guess they are selling their product for 150% of the American price there?

But many products are sold in India in English only. This is manifestly not the case in Europe.

I'm perfectly ok to have an English only product with a 30% discount, but I can't find the option. (That said, looking at the streets in Seattle, I'm not trading my 20% VAT for potholes, crumbling sidewalks and aerial electric wires in a storm prone region, thanks)

No way? Sales tax in Denmark alone is 25% and then we haven't even begun talking about additional cost of running your business here.

those are valid points, but then why don't they calculate the price they should be asking and ask that? As it stands, they don't give the impression that they do that, they seem to try to screw us over. Hell, if they had gone for €97 instead of €99, a lot less people would be complaining, because it wouldn't look like an arbitrary price hike but a calculated price.

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