Using "Big Mac Index" for Pricing your deals?

vyas

As providers, do you think it might be worth the time and effort to price your services as per the standard of living in the country? It may not work for lE price points, but what about VPS or semi-dedis (or whatever is the fancy new terms these days for VPS with dedi core)

For those who know what the Big Mac Index ¹
means, the question might be obvious. For those who do not know:
SEO influencer Neil Patel recently had a 'lifetime' offer for a search engine keyword tool called UberSuggest ². He had priced it differently for each country. Same product, same terms. For example,

Jordan: 290 USD
Brazil 110USD
India: 120 USD

below is a screenshot form the shopping cart for India

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1. Big Mac Index - Wikipedia ↩︎

2. Ubersuggest ↩︎

deepak_leb

Does that tool make any sense ? @vyas

AC_Fan

Doesn't work that well for digital commodities, but if it's a niche tool or something extremely value providing, then it could work.

InceptionHosting

It sure is interesting but wide open to abuse, removing the abuse element though and assume 90% of people are honest, it could only work in the VPS industry if there was some way to balance that upstream as we all have upstream bills to pay and I am pretty sure @clouvider does not want to give me any discounts because 50% of my customers are on a lower price index

If I could do that though, I personally would, I do like equality of opportunity.

vyas

@deepak_leb said:
Does that tool make any sense ? @vyas

It is prem.

@AnthonySmith said:
It sure is interesting but wide open to abuse,

I know several people from EU/AU/North America who used VPNs to order from Brazil or India. Maybe the biling system (Stripe) is not that smart?
I mean if I give address as India and use a German Bank-issued Credit card, wouldn't it raise a flag somewhere?

Actually, the reverse happened with me: my credit card company is upset. I was charged in Indian Rupees, but without the mandated One Time password that comes as text message. That is a flag , which once raised, requires a bit of documentation and series of explanations and approvals.

So instead of me abusing the offer, my credit card company thinks I abused their system.

berkay

I think in this particular industry it would sadly lead to more abuse attempts, therefore increasing the load on the providers. LE* providers might give it a try for sure, but I don’t see it lasting.

Nyr

In McDonald's, labor costs differ, real state costs differ and feedstock costs differ.

This doesn't translate well to the hosting industry. More like the opposite, actually: customers from some of the poorer regions end up being way costlier for the provider due to language barriers, payment methods, abuse, etc.

There are some Russian providers which offer cheaper prices for Russian customers, but I don't think that this is common for other western countries.

@vyas said: I mean if I give address as India and use a German Bank-issued Credit card, wouldn't it raise a flag somewhere?

Generally speaking, no.

Ouji

@Nyr said: Generally speaking, no.

Unless for Steam. People move their Steam accounts to Argentina, but you can't use any international card because the card must have been issued in Argentina.

I do live in Brazil, so VPSes are quite expensive for my living cost, I even dropped my Hetzner dedicated after the Euro and the USD went up. Although cheers to @seriesn for offering a payment type that Brazilians who do not have Credit Cards can pay.

In the other end, VPS hosted in Brazil are VERY expensive, so that's the reason why I buy from the US or even the EU.

seriesn

@Ouji said:

@Nyr said: Generally speaking, no.

Unless for Steam. People move their Steam accounts to Argentina, but you can't use any international card because the card must have been issued in Argentina.

I do live in Brazil, so VPSes are quite expensive for my living cost, I even dropped my Hetzner dedicated after the Euro and the USD went up. Although cheers to @seriesn for offering a payment type that Brazilians who do not have Credit Cards can pay.

In the other end, VPS hosted in Brazil are VERY expensive, so that's the reason why I buy from the US or even the EU.

.. If I am going to take your money, the least I can do is to make it easy for you to spend

deepak_leb

Compared ahref, moz, kwfinder is it accurate? @vyas

vyas

@deepak_leb said:
Compared ahref, moz, kwfinder is it accurate? @vyas

All more or less use the same principles. It’s like GTmetrix versus Pingdom tools versus google page speed. All have respective strengths and weaknesses.

The real trick lies in who is willing to go local. Particularly for India, where my business focus is.

I do not want a tool that is strong in language X but would rather have something that is halfway decent in Hindi or Marathi that is important to me.

None of the tools so far have that. Some have on the roadmap. ThE roadmap is what invested in. Of course the deep dive of website, SEO looses and foxes help. So do the keyword alerts and crawling for competing content.

BlogBing is another service- they have Hindi operational and it is WIP.

bugrakoc

As a customer I could benefit from something like this price wise, since our currency is roughly 7 times less valuable than $/€ and living costs are lower. However I wouldn't trust a provider with a stupid pricing scheme like this.

Ouji

@bugrakoc said: However I wouldn't trust a provider with a stupid pricing scheme like this.

Why? Steam does it like that.

havoc

Seems quite risky.

Differentiate by region yes, but not by big mac...it's got extra noise in it that isn't gonna lead to anything good

bugrakoc

@Ouji said: Why? Steam does it like that.

It's not the same thing. Steam sells games, which don't have significant ongoing cost associated like IPv4, bandwidth, etc. Yes, some games are multiplayer and they need servers to function, but usually the company behind the game runs those, not Valve/Steam. Also those multiplayer servers cost way less to operate than a hosting business.

Ouji

@bugrakoc said:

@Ouji said: Why? Steam does it like that.

It's not the same thing. Steam sells games, which don't have significant ongoing cost associated like IPv4, bandwidth, etc. Yes, some games are multiplayer and they need servers to function, but usually the company behind the game runs those, not Valve/Steam. Also those multiplayer servers cost way less to operate than a hosting business.

That's fair.