Why the same Netflix plan costs many times more in some countries

Published July 2026 · every figure below is read from the dataset at build time, last October 2026 · methodology

A Netflix Standard plan costs Rs 800 a month in Pakistan — $2.89 at current rates. The same plan in Switzerland is $27.55. That's a 9.5× gap for the same service, the same apps, and largely the same catalog technology. It isn't a glitch or a promotion. It's the business model.

The price map right now

Median across all 50 countries we track: $12.78/month. The full table has every country.

Why providers price this way on purpose

The jargon is purchasing-power pricing. A streaming subscription has near-zero marginal cost — one more subscriber costs Netflix almost nothing to serve — so the profitable strategy in every market is to charge whatever that market will bear. In Switzerland, that's $27.55. In Pakistan, where average income is a fraction of Switzerland's, a $27.55 price wouldn't produce premium revenue; it would produce piracy. $2.89 produces customers.

There's a second force: competition is local. In price-sensitive markets Netflix competes with cheap regional streamers and with informal sharing, so it prices near them. In rich markets it competes on catalog, not price — which is why US and Western European prices have ratcheted up almost yearly while prices in South Asia have barely moved.

Netflix is not the outlier, either. In our data Spotify spans $1.20–$19.19, and even ChatGPT Plus — a product with the same compute cost everywhere — spans $15.95–$26.83. When a product's costs don't vary by country but its prices do, you're looking at willingness-to-pay pricing, not cost pricing.

What it means if you're on the expensive end

The price tier follows the country you sign up from — determined by your IP address at signup and sometimes by your card's issuing country. That's a design decision, and it has a well-known consequence: sign up from a cheaper market and you generally get that market's price. Whether that's within the rules is a separate question — it usually breaches the provider's terms even though it's not illegal — and we've written up what actually happens and how the mechanics work.

One prediction you can bank on: the gap won't close. Providers earn more total revenue with segmented prices than with one global price, so segmented prices are here to stay. The only question is which side of the segmentation you're on.

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