Dear Adobe, we need a special price in Egypt | Hacker News Reader

Dear Adobe, we need a special price in Egypt

egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com

38 pointsah3nan67 comments

Indeed, companies should tailor their licenses to the purchasing power of their customers, at LEAST at country-level.

Still, I feel like a subscription is a service-as-a-software-substitute [1]. At least when I don't need continuous development.

There are plenty of free and open-source programs. I have gotten by with Gimp for a lot of my needs. There is also Krita and darktable, and even the browser-based miniPaint [2].

[1] - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

[2] - https://viliusle.github.io/miniPaint/

> There is also Krita and Lightroom, and even the browser-based miniPaint [2].

Lightroom as in Adobe Lightroom?

miniPaint is very impressive, thanks for sharing.

Most likely intended DarkTable

Darktable was indeed what I meant. Thanks.

I meant darktable, not Lightroom. Thanks, I changed the comment.

> Indeed, companies should tailor their licenses to the purchasing power of their customers, at LEAST at country-level.

The problem then becomes that users in ‘rich’ countries use a VPN to get the ‘poor’ country pricing.

Indeed. If this happens a lot, the optimal prices might get closer together.

But I am pretty sure the total profit will still be greater than in a single-price scenario.

> at LEAST at country-level.

Are you implying it should be even more granular? i.e. People with IP addresses in Hollywood neighborhoods should have to pay $10,000/year for Adobe software but people with IP addresses in Compton neighborhoods should only pay $10/year?

Yes.

But that pricing would be terrible; I am pretty sure the stated numbers are far from maximum total profit - at some point, even Hollywood execs turn down deals.

And number of deals is a factor in total profits (multiplication).

It's kind of surreal to live in a world where the value of (digital) goods can scale to a region's current economic status in order to maximize global profits (i.e. video game costs $60 in USA but the same game is $1 in a poor African country).

It makes sense from a business perspective but it also feels kind of cheesy because intuitively you feel like you are getting ripped off when your neighbor can buy the same good for a fraction of the cost because their country is doing poorly economically. And then it brings up some complex ethical questions like "is it stealing to use a VPN to buy a digital good at a fraction of the cost of your current geographic region"

You can view it as getting ripped off, or you can view it as being charitable towards those with less purchasing power. I prefer the latter, both for high-minded reasons and because it just makes me feel better than feeling ripped off.

Don’t think of it as money directly. Rather think of it as time. When you do, the quantities required are probably a lot closer.

That's what I'm saying. People are used to paying for a good based on its intrinsic value (cost to manufacture/distribute/etc. + some profit margin). But since digital goods are nearly 100% profit margin once created, you can instead pay with "time" aka % of your income.

That's why it's surreal (for me at least) - it would be like walking into a grocery store, but instead of fixed prices the items on shelves had labels like "Box of Lucky Charms: .005% of your annual income"

I dont feel very sorry for you.

The biggest rip-off is you having a salary that is 10-50 times higher than someone i Africa.

I doubt many Africans have the same education and/or qualification as most Americans.

This is no judgement or suggestion for improvements, but it is the reality.

Well that's no fair; nor would they have had they have the same opportunities. Do your/our good opportunities entitle us to earn 50x what someone else does? Only in a colonialist "we got here first so now you work for us" sense.

I can’t change the past. I fully support changing the course of Africa towards more education, but that doesn’t make Africans suddenly super proficient software engineers, and doesn’t teach them "how to work productively with western companies" (if you get what I mean - there’s more to work than pure manpower).

Does that make me a colonialist?

It's the opinion (that their reduced opportunities / economic bargaining position mean they _should_ be paid orders of magnitude less) that's colonialist, rather than you as a person. By 'colonialist' I of course mean to imply "regressive and repugnant". It is not an immutable economic fact that wages should be where they are relative to each other.

How about starting by making software cheaper for people in Africa?

Those who do have same qualifications are still payed much much less. Anecdotally, when Intel still had offices in Russia our salaries including stock awards were 3x or lower than those of the US personnel. Not because of difference in qualifications but because of the labor market (the salaries were very good considering other opportunities in my home city).

Thats bs. 10-50 times higher is for unskilled labor. You should try comparing a someone with an academic background in Lagos versus someone in Cairo .

Or the chance to educate themselves with for example photoshop to become a professional.

Because it is too expensive.

Software (Wolfram Mathematica is a prime example) does this too, with huge discrepancy between the pricing for individual home use and individual use if in a business place.

As I recall, it was a commonplace pricing scheme 20+ years ago in the Unix workstation times: if you were buying Framemaker (later acquired by Adobe i think) for NeXT or Sun I think it was more than if you were buying for Mac or Windows.

This could be attributed to the cost of porting to those platforms was more expensive per seat since there more windows and mac users. Especially at an era where cross platform usually meant full rewrite.

Same applies to physical goods though. For example a big mac has a different price around the world based on the average purchasing power of the region.

This has to do with the labour costs, too, though. Poorer countries have lower purchasing power, but also lower labour costs, reducing the cost it takes to produce a Big Mac.

That's a valid point. Also explains why an iPhone still costs the same since its not locally built.

Also because it is trivial to buy an iPhone in a poorer country and bring it to a richer one.

I always think it is relatively unfair that MacBooks for instance are in Europe more expensive than in the US where in US you will easily make 6 figures as a software developer and in EU the wages for software devs are typically much lower

My understanding is a large driver of this is import and VAT.

In the usa, taxes are added to the price at checkout, but in Europe, it’s before.

Also, European countries have higher import taxes on tech.

Prices for Mac products are about the same; the difference is taxes (how they are treated and the rates).

1. Taxes in the US are added on top, not inclusive. 2. Taxes in Europe are generally higher than in the US.

Looking at the MacBook Air, in the US it goes for $999.

In the UK, it goes for £999, which is $1030 after 20% VAT is deducted. In France, it goes for €1199, which is currently almost exactly $999 after 20% VAT is deducted.

Don't forget that 1 British Pound is $1.20 USD

£999 is really $1236 (and to be fair, the USA has an average sales tax of ~5%)

In Germany they are 1.199,00 €, which is $1301

Apple is always accused of ripping off other countries but most of the time it's the exchange rate.

https://www.macworld.com/article/1358386/apple-ripping-off-r...

Take off the £167 VAT first, and that gives you £832, or $1030.52. So, depending on what the £/$ value was when the price was set, it's still close.

Your calculation is wrong. UK prices and German prices are quoted VAT-inclusive, so £999 already includes VAT @ 20% and the German figure includes 19% MwSt. £999 is all you'll pay. In the US you will pay an additional amount at the register based on local sales tax, for example in Cupertino you will pay an additional $91 of sales tax bringing your total up to $1,090. Converted to USD the price difference is almost entirely tax (9.125% vs 20% on a $1k purchase).

Noted and edited

Ok, I understand prices for products are somewhat the same (although always slightly higher in Europe) but my main point is, because salaries are higher in US, it is easier to buy the same device here than it is there.

And I know salaries in California are higher than in the rest of the US. But also for other types of jobs such as construction work, compensation in US is higher than in the EU

The salaries for devs are not that much different. You’re probably thinking about the ones from California, but that’s not a usual compensation for US devs.

>you feel like you are getting ripped off when your neighbor can buy the same good for a fraction of the cost because their country is doing poorly economically. And then it brings up some complex ethical questions like "is it stealing to use a VPN to buy a digital good at a fraction of the cost of your current geographic region"

And also questions like why do some countries do poorly economically and some do well economically? Are people born in those countries responsible for the results of their ancestors actions? Or changes in weather patterns? Are people born in better performing countries entitled to the fruits of the actions of their ancestors?

Does a person in a country with a poor economy feel ripped off that they cannot hop into a country with a better economy and earn far more?

FYI, some countries have different pricing based on which passport you have, such as at national parks. If you have a passport from a richer country, you pay more, and if you have a passport from a poorer country, you pay less.

This is a fundamental philosophical question. IMO you're not responsible for your ancestor's actions. However, your ancestors were partly responsible for your welfare, just as you are partly responsible for your future generation's wellfare.

As much as we push our modern definition of "individualism", societies do not grow in isolation. Social groups that place a premium on improving the next generation do much better. If people want better lives, then start creating better lives for their kids and grandkids

> questions like why do some countries do poorly economically and some do well economically?

Just search on Wikipedia for "United Fruit Company", Bechtel etc.

Come on, it's not about being charitable or maximising profits; it's about scaling a price proportionally to the target audience's purchasing power (similar to discounts for students, et cetera).

> feels kind of cheesy because intuitively you feel like you are getting ripped off [...] and then it brings up some complex ethical questions like "is it stealing to use a VPN

An actually complex ethical question would be "does my country and my predecessors have a hand in making [poor African country] so poor that they can't buy games at 60 dollars?"

If it's not stealing when the owners of this here website pay $1.50/hr to train their AIs, it's not stealing for you to get a videogame ultimately owned by Tencent for $1.

But you should probably be furious about the former before hand-wringing either way about the latter.

This is already how the price of labor in a global market works. In many companies, virtual workers are already paid on a scale based on their home market price, not the market price where their company is located. If that's how virtual economies are going to work, then it should at least go both ways.

Can't wait until individual-level price discrimination, so that when you get a raise at work, 80% of it will be eaten by everything suddenly getting more expensive.

So far it's just digital goods, but there's no reason grocery stores won't try the same.

They do. Haven't you ever price compared a poor neighborhood's grocery store to a rich neighborhood? Meijer does this in the Midwest. The price difference is as much as 50%.

Higher prices in a different grocery store could be due to many things, such as higher labor costs, property taxes, etc.

But you can see price discrimination / segmentation even in the same grocery store. The old school way was via coupons. People who had time and inclination to clip coupons spent less (excluding their time and effort) for the same item from the same store. The more modern way, via apps, can drill down into an individual's willingness to pay price X for an item versus another individual's willingness to pay price Y for the same item.

This could be implemented as high default prices + steep discounts for people with tracking apps/cards.

It's already happening.

Luckily they can't raise the default prices too much, cause people without apps/cards will go someplace else. But with data like face recognition, it will become more prevalent, absent personal data regulation like the EU GDPR.

I have graphics artists friends in Arab countries. Apart for the (oil rich) Golf, Almost All (90-99%) of them (and their colleagues) just pirate adobe software. Those who care to justify will simply point to difference in the cost of living [1] even without large depreciations.

I was reading a book on Mediterranean history the other day and was surprised by how (real) piracy what a “normal” state of affair for literally thousands of years. I’m not justifying anything. I’m just stating that poor countries have always pirated rich ones. It is like a balancing act.

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

I wouldn't compare making a copy of a software someone wrote to capturing their ship, taking all their possessions and selling them to slavery or killing them. That's software industry propaganda.

Well "whatabout" all that entertainment industry propoganda and classist stereotypes against real pirates? How they're always relentlessly making fun of the way they talk, walk, their amputations, monocular vision, and pet preferences, shamelessly appropriating and disparagingly caricaturizing their culture for Halloween costumes and team mascots, and even cruelly comparing them to software and music thieves? ;)

I think when something is priced beyond what people can afford, and they don't have alternatives, they are more likely to acquire it some other way. Adobe is an interesting example - it's a premium product, and there are alternatives, but the talent in the design space seems to be almost exclusively using Adobe. Designers work in a global community, which makes it difficult to build skills to be competitive without equivalent access. If something costs 10+ times more on a regional salary than it would in say the US, then I'm not surprised that piracy is rife.

Subscription pricing has compounded this. Back when you bought up front and selectively paid for lower cost upgrade maintenance, people would stomach the pain, as you ended up with a product you had security of ownership on. Today, in South Africa as an example, the cost of an annual CC subscription could be as much as 10% of a junior designer's annual package, if not more. It's sad, as regions like Africa have young, creative populations who could really contribute to creative communities given half the chance.

Why should Adobe do this? Are they giving up a large market for their products in Egypt? If they reduced the price, would they make it up in volume? It doesn't sound like it.

Would they be able to prevent others in wealthier countries from taking advantage of a lower price in Egypt?

Why are Egyptian Pounds dropping relative to Dollars? How about fixing this at the ballot box? Or is that a dubious proposition as well?

i certainly feel for the problems people have in this regard, but it can't possibly be limited to one software package. Clearly any US based product is going to incur the same expense, and as such, Adobe products add no greater egypt tax than any other US product. Now perhaps the number of US products needed for purchase in egypt is small, and this is a big example, but Adobe isn't doing this to people, at least not in a targeted way.

No, what we need is less Adobe.

Kthxbai.

It's a good time to mention that Affinity's launch sale for v2 of their suite is running until next Wednesday.

Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher, on Mac/Windows/iPad. One time payment of $100 for all of them, increasing to $170 after the sale.

I know some people are too deep in the Adobe ecosystem for this to be a replacement but for me it's the best deal I've gotten on any software in years. Adobe has priced themselves out of the hobbyist market.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/affinity-pricing/

Thanks an Affinity.

I don't remember hearing about them, but I see HN has discussed it before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530356

Perhaps you could do a Tell HN post? I'm also wondering what's happening with Adobe acquiring Figma. There's https://penpot.app/ I took a look and saw that this is still there :) https://www.figma.com/figma-vs-adobe-xd/

Upvoted from South Africa! At our exchange rate we are hugely disadvantaged on all USD / EU / GBP priced products, which in turn affects our ability to participate in global markets on the same footing. Whilst there are alternate products, everyone we work with uses the Adobe suite for good reason, it is a superb solution, and we haemorrhage our bank accounts to be able to use these tools which we love so dearly.

Google is the best example w.r.t to PPP imo

i don't understand... what are the consequences of economic failure if everything is adjusted proportionally?

That's cute but there are free alternatives. Or you can start making income in USD so that it makes sense to purchase software in the same currency.

Microsoft, Netflix, Google and many more offer different prices for the same products in different countries. Why can't Adobe do that?

They don't do it _at all_?

https://vpnwiki.com/en/youtube-premium-subscription-prices-b...

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/countries-netfl...

I'm asking about Adobe. Genuinely curious.

They absolutely do. To pick one out of countless examples, YouTube Premium is about $1.56/month in India and $22.99/month in Canada.

I mean Adobe.

Well then, yeah, obviously Adobe doesn't do it. That's what this entire thread is about – someone asking them to do something they don't already do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com