Guide · 6 min read
Where streaming is cheapest, and where it quietly costs a fortune
Netflix and Spotify localise prices aggressively. Measured against local wages, the cheap markets and the painful ones aren't the ones you'd guess.
Streaming services were among the first products to fully embrace local pricing. A Netflix or Spotify subscription is pure software — no shipping, no import duty — so the company is free to charge each market whatever maximises subscribers. The result is one of the widest, and least obvious, price gaps in consumer tech.
The raw gap
Take Netflix’s top Premium tier. In dollar terms it is cheapest in India at about $7 a month and most expensive in United States at $27 — the same 4K catalogue for multiples of the price. Spotify tells a similar story, running from roughly $1 a month in India up to $17 in United Kingdom.
Now weigh it against income
Here is where intuition fails. The country with the lowest dollar price is not the one where streaming feels cheapest. Measured as a share of one month’s average income, Netflix Premium is lightest in Singapore — around 0.3% of a month’s income — and heaviest in India at about 3.0%. A subscription that looks cheap on the invoice can still be a meaningful monthly commitment where wages are low, even after the company discounts it.
Why the “just use a VPN” trick rarely pays
Every time these gaps surface, someone suggests signing up through a cheaper country with a VPN. In practice it seldom works and usually breaks the rules. Netflix and Spotify tie your price to the billing country and the payment method behind it, and both increasingly re-check your location. Accounts created in the wrong country can be downgraded or suspended, and you would be violating the terms either way. The honest read of the data is not “how do I game it” but “how differently the same product is valued around the world.”
The takeaway
Localised pricing is fairer than a single global price — it broadly tracks what people can pay. But “cheap” and “affordable” are not the same word. The dollar price tells you what a company charges; the share of income tells you what it costs to live with.
Compare every plan and country on the Netflix and Spotify pages, or see subscriptions ranked by affordability on the affordability index.