I get decent traffic from India/Southeast Asia, but 0 sales.
I’ve read conflicting advice:
The "SaaS" View: Don't lower prices; filter for high-value customers.
The "Game/Ebook" View: Lower prices significantly (60%+) to match local purchasing power, because zero marginal cost = free money.
Since my product has no server upkeep (it's just a Next.js app), I just enabled aggressive PPP.
Has anyone here successfully monetized a one-time purchase dev tool in India? Or is the "Free or Nothing" culture too strong?
The most recent one I remember was some tool (Show HN) that searches the Mac with a local AI. I’m yet to start using it. I like the idea, and I might use it someday. It was beta-discounted
I’m from India.
You get funny things that happen like when a rep from a company will call you and warn you not to do a deal with another rep from the same company, then 2 hours later we get a call from the other rep.
I’m eventually going to go subscription only, people from Asia tend to really hate that and refuse to pay for subscriptions but we make so little money from them that it’s not worth catering to them, we’re better off dropping that entire region.
If you have no sales, but your costs are very low, you should try it.
The main reason not to would be costs or cannibalizing your higher value customers (which you don't have).
There are exceptions. Some SaaS products have infrastructure costs that scale linearly per customer, for example if you spin up a separate database for each tenant. Others are very hands-on, where a large part of the cost is human support or service work, so each new customer does add real cost.
But for the vast majority of self-serve SaaS products, the cost of adding one more customer is effectively near zero in the context of the overall business.
You need to process X% more requests, you need X% more machines.
You need to store X% more data, you need to buy that much more disk, etc.
Many things scale worse than linearly too.
If your SaaS product doesn't do very much, sure, the costs might be cheap, but plenty of SaaS products just do a lot, processing lots of data for customers.
Datadog it a canonical example of an excellent software business, but even still, they have real infra costs because there's just a lot of data to process.
For our voucher system we decided to not do PPP otherwise you need some kind of geoblock ala Steam to avoid code reselling.
To solve this, I decided against just using a 'coupon' on the main checkout. Instead, I set up a completely separate payment flow (Topmate) specifically for India that requires local UPI payment methods.
My theory is that the requirement to use a local Indian payment method acts as a 'natural geoblock' against arbitrage. Interesting to hear that India didn't convert well for you even with PPP—I'll keep my expectations in check.
