Made a free tool so people can see the pricing problem before signing up

The interesting move is making the free tool demonstrate the problem before asking users to buy.

What would convince you that seeing the pricing gap is enough to make developers change their pricing strategy, rather than simply satisfy curiosity and move on?

I really like the idea of “the tool is the argument.”
I’m building an AI worksheet tool for teachers, and I’ve noticed the same thing: explaining the pain is often harder than letting people experience the solution.
When users can immediately see the before/after difference, the value becomes much clearer.

The PPP framing is the right one. $10 in the US and the same $10 converted into Vietnamese dong or Omani rial are completely different amounts of someone's month, and most devs never think about it — they just let the exchange rate decide for them. Making the calculator free and public is a smart move too: seeing an "overcharging 2.8×" column next to your own price lands harder than any amount of landing page copy.

One place where it gets more complicated, from my side:

It works cleanly when your marginal cost per user is close to zero — habit tracker, note app, photo editor. There a −60% price is simply less revenue, but still revenue.

I'm running a product with per-user API costs, so my price isn't really a free variable — it's built up from what each user actually consumes. That gives me a hard break-even floor, and unlike the price, usage doesn't scale down with PPP. Past a certain discount the subscription lands below what it costs to serve that person, and a "localized" subscriber ends up costing me more than a free one would have.

Not a criticism of the tool — more the opposite. It made me realise that the price floor feature is probably the single most important one you have for anyone with variable costs, and right now it's just one bullet in a feature list. Might be worth surfacing it in the free calculator itself: let people enter their cost per user per month, and highlight which tiers fall below it in red. That one column would turn the calculator from "here's a fairer price" into "here's a fairer price you can actually afford" — and it's exactly the objection that would otherwise stop people like me from connecting an app.

On the trust answer above - testimonials solve for whether the tool works, but I don't think that's the objection blocking most people here.

The harder one is whether the gap is costing enough to bother. Someone can fully believe PricePush does what it says and still not act, because they have never seen the localization gap expressed as a monthly number against their own revenue. Testimonials from other builders don't move that, since the reader discounts them as someone else's market.

I'm building in payment recovery, where the problem is invisible in the same way, and the only thing that has reliably changed someone's mind is putting a figure in front of them that came from their own inputs. Category averages get nodded at. Their own number is the one that itches.

If the Localizer could end on "here's roughly what your current single price costs you per month across these markets," the free tool stops being a demo and starts being the argument you said you wanted it to be.

Is that number computable from what you already have, or would it need their actual sales data?

The free-tool-as-the-argument approach is right, and there is one structural gap in this particular implementation worth closing. Disclosure: I work on growth at Ojin, so I am reading this as a funnel rather than as an app developer.

Your free tool demonstrates the problem, but it also partly solves it. Someone types a base price, sees the table across 193 countries, and now owns the analysis. If they sell in six countries rather than 193, they can go set six prices by hand and never need PricePush at all. The analytical half is the part you gave away and the tedious half is the part you are selling, so the tool has to make the tedium visible or it quietly satisfies the need it was meant to create.

Concretely: alongside the prices, show the work. Number of individual store edits required, roughly how long that takes per platform, and how often it has to be redone as exchange rates drift. "Here are your 193 prices" invites curiosity. "Here are your 193 prices, and setting them by hand is 193 store edits you will need to repeat every time rates move" is the version that converts. That also answers the curiosity-versus-action question raised above with a mechanism rather than a hope.

Second, smaller point: requiring no account is good for getting people in, but it means you cannot follow up with anyone who felt the problem and then got pulled away. The CSV export is your natural capture moment, and it is a genuine exchange rather than a gate, so asking for an email at export instead of at entry puts the friction where it actually belongs.

One more worth flagging: a 193-country price calculator is a programmatic SEO asset, not only a demo. There is real long-tail search volume around what apps cost in specific countries. If each country can have its own indexable URL with that country’s numbers prefilled, the tool turns into an acquisition channel rather than just a conversion device.

For what it is worth, your instinct on trust looks correct to me. Sourced testimonials with real links are considerably more convincing than the usual carousel.