This number really varies based on where you live, and there is no pricing model that accounts for this. I suppose it is mostly just aimed at Americans.
Part of the difficulty in doing this at early stage (without VC) is that your costs often don't scale in proportion to customer ability to pay.
A big chunk of the costs of running Kagi will come from external search indexes - their founder is active here and was pretty open about the impacts on costs when Bing raised their API pricing significantly. That's just one player in the market, but when Bing raises their prices, they don't offer discounts to make it cheaper for developing countries for users downstream.
With investment or a significant customer base in full-price countries, it's easier to subsidize a lower price model for developing markets. Trouble is, businesses like Kagi aren't in the business of getting eyeballs today for future monetization (which works fine as justification to grow user stats if someone else is footing the server bills, and is willing to buy future growth).
It's certainly an imperfect setup, but regional pricing seems an interesting challenge to make work without relying on external investment.
https://www.oecd.org/sdd/purchasingpowerparities-frequentlya...
It does seem people's opinions on this are cultural and situational, though. Like many people do not feel particularly upset by a veteran or senior discount. But for textbooks, I think most people feel like the massive margins publishers push are already unreasonable and thus the existence of asymmetric pricing is actually evidence that the margins are larger than necessary.
Not sure, though. Most practices that involve some form of discrimination are bound to be controversial in some way. (Even describing them using the term 'discrimination' is sometimes controversial due to the connotations that the word carries, but alas.)
No, it varies based on who you are. Even poor countries are full of rich people. They are usually part of the reason why their countries are poor.
By this logic they should increase their prices to $1,000,000/mo. They are not a charity, right? Why would they sell it for a measly $10?
The point is, pricing is adjusted to maximise profitability. If lowering the price for a specific market increases your profitability, you would go for it. There is a sweet spot, but it is not the same for every customer. You need segmentation to fully utilise the potential.
I remember I could see my usage which was about 700 searches per month and which costed ~8$ I think. My subscription was 10$ so 2$ would go to pay their devs and to R&D. So they can't really go lower then 10$ for specific markets.
