A list price is not a global price
Open a SaaS pricing page from your office. You see a number. You put it in a competitor slide. You have not measured the product. You have measured the price for your IP.
The common belief is that a public /premium or /pricing URL is one storefront. It is not. Many merchants and subscription brands render a local list from geography and purchasing power. The HTML you got in London is not the HTML a visitor in São Paulo got.
The VPN tab is not a comparison
If you sit on a SaaS pricing team, you already have the clumsy version of this job. Someone on the team toggles a VPN, screenshots India, pastes into a sheet, looks up a mid-market FX rate, and argues about whether the plan name even matched. Deal hunters do the same dance for a digital subscription. Agencies deliver the screenshots as a “geo audit.”
That method fails for a boring reason. Datacenter IPs and “no proxy” fetches often get the default market, not the local one. The screenshot is a moment, not a row. The FX tab is yesterday’s close. PPP never enters the sheet, so a cheap cash price in a low-income market looks like a steal when it may be less surprising in international dollars.
The belief that is wrong: the number on the page is the list price. What is really happening: the number on the page is the list price for that visitor country. Same URL, different storefront, then a redirect to /us/, /in/, /br/ once the edge has classified you.
I built the comparator around that. Residential proxy, country code, then extract. Convert to one currency. Optionally sit a purchasing-power estimate next to the cash price. One observation per market. One summary per product: cheapest country, widest spread, best deal in the currency you chose.
Same URL, one IP per market
Pick a public product or pricing page. Pick ISO country codes. Fetch through a residential IP in each market. Read title, image, local price, and currency. Convert. Write the comparison.
That is the Geo Price Comparator API. Run it on Apify.
A public Spotify Premium page is the clean teaching example: dollars, reais, and rupees for what is notionally the same plan family. Exact figures move with FX and copy. The point is the gap after conversion, not a screenshot of three tabs.
Residential proxies are required. Without them you are not comparing geo prices. You are comparing one market to itself.
Who should run it
If you audit regional list prices against purchasing power before a launch, this is for you. If you monitor a rival’s subscription page from several countries on a schedule, this is for you. If you publish regional deals and you need the cash price after FX, this is for you.
If you want to abuse licensing or payment rules, do not. Public pages only; you own how you use the rows.
Heavy JavaScript checkouts and age-gated storefronts can fail. PPP factors are rough relative numbers, not advice. Start with two or three countries and one URL you can see in a browser. Input, pricing, and the rest of the caveats live on the Apify Store README for Geo Price Comparator.
Extracting a clinic’s fees from a local SME site is a different job — priced line items from a fees page, not a cross-border fetch of one SKU. Both sit with the other posts on rainminer.
One IP is a single data point
The cost of the old way is a slide that quotes the US list as if it were the world. Pricing teams make regional decisions on that fiction. Deal posts go out with a number that only exists for the author’s laptop.
The list price was never global. Fetch each market, convert, read the spread.