Why Fexyn charges $9.99 in the US and $2.99 in Turkey: regional pricing, explained
A VPN in the US costs about as much as a coffee. The same VPN at the same price in Turkey costs as much as a meal. In Egypt, more. In Pakistan, several days of food. A flat global price is a way of pricing out the people who often need a VPN most: the ones in countries where the network is filtered, throttled, or surveilled.
Fexyn uses regional pricing across 192 countries. This post explains the methodology: what we look at, why, and where the system has limits. It's deliberately transparent because nobody else in this industry seems to talk about it openly.
The problem with flat pricing
Most VPN providers list a single global price ($3.39/mo for NordVPN's 2-year deal, $6.67/mo for ExpressVPN's annual, $5/mo flat for Mullvad). The price is set with US/EU consumers in mind. (This is structurally a form of geo-blocking applied to commerce — the price wall keeps out users from lower-income regions even when no network filter does.)
If you live somewhere with a strong currency and a comfortable income, this is fine. If you live in Turkey, where median monthly income runs around $400, a $5/mo VPN is more than 1% of monthly income. That's the equivalent of a US user paying $50/mo for a VPN. Most won't.
Free VPNs fill that gap. Free VPNs survive by selling user data. The people most exposed to surveillance end up using the products most likely to surveil them. The flat-pricing model hands them to that outcome.
Regional pricing is the alternative.
The four-tier system
Fexyn groups countries into four pricing tiers. Each tier has a base price for the individual monthly plan, with proportional adjustments for longer commitments and other plan types.
| Tier | Example countries | Individual / mo |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | US, UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Norway | $9.99 |
| 2 | Spain, Italy, Poland, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, UAE | $5.99 |
| 3 | Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Malaysia, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus | $3.99 |
| 4 | Turkey, Russia, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria, Argentina | $2.99 |
The tier you see on the pricing page is determined from your IP via Cloudflare's CF-IPCountry header. The tier is locked at checkout from the same headers, so the system can't be gamed by switching VPNs to browse from a cheaper country (the actual purchase IP is what counts).
Yearly plans get a further discount on top of the tier rate. Family and Team plans scale similarly.
How the tiers were built
Three signals, weighted:
Numbeo Local Purchasing Power Index (LPPI)
Numbeo publishes a Local Purchasing Power Index, which measures what an average local salary buys at local prices, indexed to New York City. The US sits around 100. Switzerland sits around 138. Turkey sits around 38. Pakistan sits around 21.
LPPI is the most direct measure of what a $9.99 VPN actually costs someone in the local economy. We use it as the primary input.
Spotify Premium pricing as a proxy
Spotify has spent more than a decade fighting through the same problem we're trying to solve: how do you price a digital subscription globally when income varies by 10x between countries? Spotify's regional pricing is the result of a lot of in-market research we'd otherwise have to redo.
Spotify Premium is $11.99/mo in the US, ₺27.99/mo in Turkey (about $0.85), ₹119/mo in India (about $1.40), ₽199/mo in Russia (about $2.20). The ratios between Spotify's tiers map closely onto our tier system, which is a useful sanity check.
We're not as cheap as Spotify in our lowest tier. Spotify benefits from massive scale and zero marginal cost per stream. We have real bandwidth costs per user. But the relative ordering of tiers tracks Spotify's pricing closely.
Payment rail availability
Some currencies are difficult to accept. Some countries have restrictive payment processing rules that affect what we can charge in local currency. Russia and Ukraine require crypto-only billing for sanctions reasons. Turkey requires TRY billing through specific Turkish payment processors. India requires UPI integration to be competitive.
Where local currency processing is hard or impossible, we fall back to USD billing accepted via crypto. The price stays at the tier rate; the rail changes.
What we don't do
A few practices we explicitly avoid:
No fake "regular price" inflation. Some competitors list "$12.99/mo" with a "70% discount" that requires a 2-year commitment. The discounted price is the actual price; the "regular" is fictional. We don't do this. The price you see is the price.
No "first month free" with auto-conversion. We have a 7-day free trial that doesn't require pre-paying. After the trial, you choose a plan. We don't auto-convert and bill you for a year while you're not paying attention.
No charging more for "premium servers." Every plan gets every server. The pricing tier is your country, not a server upcharge.
No surge pricing. The tier doesn't change based on demand or whether the network in your region is currently under heavy filtering. The pricing is fixed for as long as the tier system is in place.
Where the system has limits
Anti-arbitrage
If everyone in the US could get the Tier 4 price by setting their browser language to Turkish, the system would collapse. We use the IP at checkout, validated against billing address, to lock the tier. Crypto payments are validated against the IP that initiated the checkout flow. This catches casual arbitrage but not someone who genuinely uses a Turkish IP and a Turkish payment method.
We've decided that's acceptable. Someone going to that much effort to save $7/mo is making a choice. We're not the IRS.
Country reclassifications
Income levels and currency strength change. Turkey was Tier 3 in 2022 before lira devaluation pushed effective purchasing power down. Argentina has bounced between tiers as inflation has spiked. We re-evaluate annually and adjust as needed. We notify existing customers in advance of any tier change and grandfather their existing subscription term.
Currency fluctuation
The local-currency display on the pricing page is computed from current FX rates. The rate at the moment you sign up is the rate that applies to your subscription. If the local currency falls 20% against the dollar between signups, your subscription stays priced at the original local-currency rate until renewal. Renewals are repriced at the renewal date.
Tax handling
VAT/GST applies in jurisdictions that require it. The display price on the pricing page includes the local VAT where required by law (EU, UK, Switzerland, Australia, NZ, several others). For B2B purchases with valid VAT IDs, VAT is reverse-charged.
Where you can see this in action
Visit the pricing page from a Turkish, Brazilian, or Indian IP and you'll see your local-tier pricing in local currency. From a US, UK, or German IP you'll see Tier 1. The country shown can be changed for browsing purposes, but the actual checkout is locked to your real IP, so if you want the Tier 4 price you need to be on a Tier 4 connection.
This is how it should work. Pricing should reflect what people in different economies can actually afford.
Related
- Pricing — see your tier
- How to choose a VPN in 2026: pricing transparency as a buyer signal
- Free VPN risks: why the alternative to paid is rarely "free"
- About Fexyn
Try Fexyn free for 7 days at your local tier rate.