App Store pricing by country: base price, overrides and PPP

Since the 2023 pricing upgrade, every app and in-app purchase has a base storefront. Apple generates the other prices from it, following each market's most common price convention, and updates them periodically when taxes or exchange rates move. It notifies you before those updates and never touches the base price. Recent rounds covered Poland, Switzerland and Türkiye (announced October 2025) and South Korea (May 2026), and each time only storefronts on equalized prices moved.

You can change the base later, but the change takes effect immediately and deletes every scheduled price change, so note your schedule first. In-app purchases follow the app's new base unless you already gave them their own pricing or base.

A Custom Price Change has two modes. "Manually manage prices in specific countries or regions" lets you pick storefronts (never the base) and set their prices. "Manually manage prices in all countries or regions" asks for a base price and turns off Apple's adjustments in all 175. To hand a storefront back to Apple, schedule a Global Price Change.

Manual means you own the upkeep: if a currency falls 20% against your base, nobody reprices that storefront for you. Review manual storefronts at least yearly and after any adjustment email from Apple.

A Temporary Price Change is the clean way to run a sale in a few markets: pick storefronts, a start and an end date (at most a year apart), and the previous price returns on the end date. Apple doesn't adjust those storefronts during the window. If the window includes your base, Apple pauses automatic adjustments in all 175 storefronts until it ends.

Changes start at a different local time in each storefront; Apple's start-times reference lists them. A change scheduled for a time that has already passed somewhere applies there immediately but can take up to 24 hours to show for everyone.

Auto-renewable subscriptions are priced per storefront from the same ladders, with two differences. Apple never reprices them for tax or currency changes; when VAT changes, your proceeds change instead. And you can schedule only one future price change per storefront and billing plan; a second one overwrites the first.

A decrease reaches existing subscribers at their next renewal and can't be reversed once live. For an increase you choose: keep current subscribers on their price, or move them, in which case Apple notifies them or asks for consent, depending on the storefront and the size of the increase. The subscription guide walks through both.

Flat equalization is Apple's default and needs no upkeep. It suits apps whose buyers are mostly in high-income markets, where the PPP ratio is close to 1 anyway (about 0.80 for Germany and 0.89 for the UK on 2025 World Bank figures).

Purchasing power parity scales the price by how far money goes locally. The World Bank publishes a PPP conversion factor (local currency per international dollar); divide it by the market exchange rate and you get a ratio: about 0.23 for India, 0.46 for Brazil and 0.41 for Türkiye on 2025 figures. Multiply Apple's equalized price by the ratio and snap the result to a point, and India goes from INR 499 to INR 115.

The Big Mac index compares the dollar price of one burger. It's narrower and can disagree sharply: in July 2026 a Big Mac in Türkiye cost more in dollars than in the US, so the index suggests no discount there while PPP suggests about 60% off. Treat any index as a starting point and judge it by conversion and proceeds per storefront.

High-inflation economies need a closer eye. Türkiye's PPP ratio moved from about 0.35 in 2024 to 0.41 in 2025 on World Bank data, so recompute at least yearly, and set a floor so no storefront lands below a price worth selling for.

Raw PPP math gives numbers like INR 114.97 or BRL 13.67. Apple only accepts points from each currency's ladder, so you snap anyway; the question is which way. Follow the convention Apple's own equalization uses in that market. For a $4.99 base it returned INR 499, BRL 29.90, TRY 249.99, JPY 800, EUR 5.99 in Germany and GBP 4.99 in the UK: whole rupees, .90 in Brazil, .99 in Türkiye and Europe, round yen.

Charm endings (.99, .90, a trailing 9) read as normal almost everywhere, and since 2023 Apple also offers rounded endings like X.00 or X.90, which suit annual plans and bundles. When two points are equally close, take the one a local shopper expects. Doing this by hand for 174 storefronts is slow; MetaRun's pricing engine snaps every storefront at once and shows each move from the raw number to the price point before anything is staged.

Apple converts your base price into every currency at roughly the exchange rate. $9.99 in the US becomes the equivalent of $9.99 in India, Brazil and Egypt, where it's a very different amount of money. Fixing that by hand means 175 dropdowns, each with its own list of allowed prices.

MetaRun computes the prices with purchasing power parity from World Bank data, the Big Mac index, the Spotify index or a straight conversion, rounds them to charm prices, and resolves each to an actual Apple price point. Your agent gets the full table and stages it.