It’s a game of whack a mole. In the past I’ve been able to get it to work in India, but now YT India blocks foreign payment cards. Was able to set up a monthly subscription in Ukraine recently using my foreign credit card. The taxes support the war effort I guess.
That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.
At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone's pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It's just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.
Not approving of any corporate behaviours here, but extracting the maximum price a market will bear has been the basis of pricing and supply/demand since such concepts existed which is at least 250 years.
I don't disagree but it seems to me it's going crescendo, with de facto monopolies running the show and buying anything that could be an obstacle, be it other companies or policymakers.
So if it makes sense to charge people in India 1/4 the people in the US why can't we pretend we are in India? People travel to other continents for healthcare.
Yeah, there's no real costs, because in this case it's a cost of "lost opportunity" in advertising.
As a rich westerner, your eyeballs are worth more than some rickshaw driver in deepest darkest India, because you have more money to fritter away on nonsense.
Never understood how the third world pricing logic holds up for things like video games, since the hardware to play them costs pretty much the same no matter where you are.
Never understood how the third world pricing logic holds up for things like video games, since the hardware to play them costs pretty much the same no matter where you are.
They just blocked a few of the main ones. I was able to sign up from Sri Lanka last week for ~$4/mo family plan. Might meet more investigating to see where works.
You assume there is no other use for the VPN? And honestly, you can get a free trial of a VPN if you want to, to handle this, it doesn’t need a yearly re-up or anything, just when your card expires.
With FreeVPNs, probably, but otherwise it’s not too big of a deal. Once in a while some specific sites will be broken, like archive.is recently would force you into an infinite captcha (which was really annoying because I couldn’t read many archive links posted here). Some big sites that are targets for various attacks will use a captcha in the login process, but once you do it it goes away.
Tbh, that's pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can't really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it's one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that's why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.
There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.
If anyone wants to keep going with this, try Google Play Gift Cards for said countries. You can pay for it via gift card balances, You can find them in key selling websites, or have someone you know in those countries buy gift cards.
No, you see this is different from when google puts their headquarter in a different country to where they are working to pay less taxes because that’s … uh … just pay your 17 bucks and stop complaining.
gizmodo.com
Hot