How Apple sets your subscription price in 175 countries
When you price an auto-renewable subscription, you pick one base price and App Store Connect fills in the other 174 storefronts. Those prices come from exchange rates and local taxes, and once set they stay put until you change them.
Price points
You can’t charge any amount you like. Each storefront has a fixed ladder of price points, about 800 per currency according to Apple’s documentation. In the US the ladder goes up in $0.10 steps to $9.99, then in $0.50 steps to $49.99, then in larger steps above that. Every price you schedule must be one of these points.
Equalization
Every price point in your base country has an equivalent point in each other storefront. Apple calls these equalizations and chooses them using exchange rates and taxes. When you choose $4.99 as your US price, App Store Connect proposes the equalized point for every other country. You can accept them or edit any country before confirming.
The App Store Connect API exposes the same mapping: each subscription price point has an equalizations relationship listing its counterparts in other territories. How to use it.
Subscription prices don’t follow exchange rates
This surprises many developers. For paid apps and one-time purchases, Apple adjusts prices when taxes or exchange rates move significantly. For auto-renewable subscriptions, it doesn’t. Apple’s help page says those retail price changes “will exclude auto-renewable subscriptions”.
So a subscription priced two years ago in a country whose currency has since lost half its value is now half as expensive in dollar terms, and your proceeds have dropped with it. When VAT changes, your proceeds change too, because Apple’s commission and your share are calculated after tax. Reviewing prices once or twice a year catches both.
What equalization doesn’t do
Equalization keeps prices roughly equal at market exchange rates. It doesn’t account for what things cost locally. That is why a $4.99 subscription can be several times more expensive, in local terms, in India or Egypt than in the US. Adjusting for that is called PPP pricing. AppPriceKit uses Apple’s equalization as its last step: it picks a US price point from each country’s price level, then takes Apple’s equalized local price for that point. Equalization vs. AppPriceKit.