Apple price tier system explained: how price points map to currencies

Apple's 900-tier price system is the invisible layer behind every App Store price. Here's how tiers map to currencies, why your prices change without you touching them, and how to use per-territory overrides for PPP pricing.

If you have ever opened App Store Connect, set a U.S. price of $9.99, and wondered why the Indian price came out as ₹830 — and then wondered why that ₹830 jumps to ₹899 some months later without you touching it — the answer is the same in both cases: Apple price tiers. App Store pricing isn't free-form. You don't type "$9.99" and have it propagate; you pick a tier, and Apple maintains a giant mapping from that tier to a specific price point in each currency, refreshed as exchange rates and tax law shift.

For most of the App Store's history this system was opaque, undocumented in plain language, and the source of endless support-forum threads. In 2022 Apple expanded it to 900 tiers, added custom price points, and gave developers far more granular control — at the cost of even more complexity. This post walks through how the tier system actually works, what changes Apple has made, and how to think about pricing decisions inside it.

What an Apple price tier actually is

A price tier is, mechanically, a row in an internal Apple lookup table. Each row maps one tier number (e.g. "Tier 10") to a specific price point in every currency Apple supports. When you set your app's price to Tier 10, you are not committing to "$9.99 in the U.S." — you are committing to whatever Apple's table says Tier 10 means in each market, today and as Apple updates it.

Roughly:

• Tier 1 = $0.99 in the U.S., €1.19 in the Eurozone, ₹89 in India, ¥160 in Japan, R$5.90 in Brazil, etc.
• Tier 10 = $9.99 / €10.99 / ₹830 / ¥1,600 / R$54.90
• Tier 50 = $49.99 / €54.99 / ₹4,400 / ¥8,000 / R$269.90

The values in each currency are not the result of currency conversion at that moment. They are price points — round-looking, locally-natural numbers that Apple has chosen for that market. ¥1,600 in Japan is a "nice" price; ₹830 in India is similarly a price point that ends in a clean digit. Apple's pricing team curates these on a per-market basis.

What changed in 2022 (and why it matters)

Before late 2022, Apple offered roughly 87 standard tiers plus a handful of "alternative" tiers. The system was crude: pricing jumped in coarse increments, you could not, for example, charge $4.49 in the U.S., and you had no way to set country-specific overrides without renegotiating your entire global price ladder.

The expansion brought three concrete changes that meaningfully affect how you should price an app today:

1. 900 price points per currency, with much finer granularity at the low and middle ends. You can now set $1.49, $2.49, $4.49, $5.99 — prices that previously didn't exist as tiers.
2. Per-territory base prices. You can choose a different "base" market — for example, set your base price in Japan as ¥1,200 rather than letting Apple derive it from a U.S. anchor — and Apple will compute the rest of the world from that.
3. Manual per-territory overrides. You can pick a specific price point per country, independent of any tier. This is the foundation of PPP-adjusted pricing: you set the base, then override India, Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, etc. to lower price points that match local purchasing power.

This last change is the one that quietly mattered most. Before 2022, "PPP pricing" on the App Store was an aspirational concept that required you to drop your global tier and watch revenue collapse in high-income markets. After 2022, you can keep $9.99 in the U.S. and Germany while charging the equivalent of $3 in India — without trading off one for the other.

How tiers map to currencies, in practice

The exact tier-to-currency mapping changes any time Apple updates its price points (typically a few times a year, plus emergency updates after large currency moves). The table below shows roughly where the most common tiers landed at the time of writing — useful as a mental model, not a contract.

Two patterns are worth pointing out. First, the EUR price is consistently 10-15% above the USD price, even though the EUR is roughly at parity with the USD. That's because Apple's EUR prices are inclusive of VAT, while U.S. prices are not. The same logic explains the higher-than-you'd-expect prices in the U.K., Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.

Second, the INR and BRL prices look extremely high once you mentally convert them — ₹830 is roughly $10, but in local purchasing-power terms, ₹830 is more like $30-$40 to an Indian software engineer. This is the gap that PPP pricing is built to close. We've covered the fix in detail in our deep-dive on PPP pricing.

How tiers update — and why your prices change without you doing anything

One of the most disorienting parts of the tier system is that your prices change even when you don't touch them. A tier is a pointer, not a price. When Apple updates the tier table — because the rupee dropped against the dollar, or Brazil added a new tax, or the EU revised VAT — your prices shift automatically in the affected territories.

This is by design. Apple is choosing a stable price point in each currency rather than a stable conversion. From the user's perspective, ¥1,600 in Japan stays ¥1,600 even when the yen weakens. From the developer's perspective, your USD-equivalent revenue from Japan can drift up or down without you doing anything.

For most indie developers this is fine — Apple is doing the right thing on your behalf. But it does mean two things in practice:

• You should not assume that the price you set six months ago is still the price the user is seeing today. Always check current numbers before quoting prices in marketing copy or email campaigns.
• If you've set per-territory price points rather than tiers, those points can become stale relative to Apple's updated tier table. A territory you priced at "Apple's PPP-adjusted equivalent of Tier 5" may no longer be aligned with that tier after the next refresh.

Custom App Pricing and how it interacts with tiers

Alongside the 2022 expansion, Apple introduced Custom App Pricing: the ability to fully detach from the tier system and set arbitrary price points per country, including ones that don't appear in any tier. For most apps this is overkill — the default tier-then-override flow is enough. But it matters for two cases:

1. Subscriptions with mid-cycle pricing changes. If you want to grandfather existing subscribers at a specific price while raising the price for new subscribers, Custom App Pricing gives you finer control over the new price than the tier system alone.
2. Apps with strong local-pricing intuitions. If you've A/B-tested ₹249 in India and found it dramatically outperforms ₹230 (Apple's nearest tier), Custom App Pricing lets you commit to ₹249 specifically.

The catch: once you opt into custom price points for a territory, you've taken responsibility for that price. Apple won't auto-update it when the tier table refreshes, so you can drift out of alignment with local norms over time. That's a maintenance burden — which is exactly the burden tools like our Price Manager exist to absorb.

How to think about tiers when pricing your app

For a new app launch, the heuristic that works for most indie iOS developers:

1. Pick a U.S. anchor tier first. What price point makes sense in dollars? $4.99? $9.99? $14.99? Don't think globally yet.
2. Look at the auto-generated price table Apple shows you. The Eurozone, U.K., Japan, Australia, Canada, Korea numbers are usually fine — they reflect local price-point conventions.
3. Override the low-PPP markets manually. India, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, Philippines, Nigeria, South Africa — these will look painfully high under default conversion. Drop each to a tier 30-50% below the auto value, depending on how aggressive you want to be on PPP.
4. Revisit every 3-6 months. Currency moves and Apple's tier refreshes will drift your overrides over time. Either re-anchor to current tiers, or use a tool that does it for you.

For more on which markets to override and by how much, see our full territory reference — every App Store country with its PPP tier and a typical price-point recommendation.

Sources and further reading

• Apple — Set a price for your app (App Store Connect Help)
• Apple Developer News — App Store global pricing system update (2022)
• RevenueCat blog — local pricing and subscription benchmarks
• Phiture — App Store growth and pricing research
• World Bank — PPP conversion factor (data)
• The Economist — Big Mac Index