Wrong automatic prices for In-App-purchases

I would set the prices manually but there seem no upload csv files

Right. You need to use the App Store Connect API.

It would be great if there were a trustworthy program you could use that would read from e.g. a csv file and talk to the API. But as far as I am aware, there is no such thing.

The exchange rates seems to be completely off.

Is this because it is only using the "round" $x.99 prices in the automatic currencies?

If you look at $9.99 or EUR 10.00, are the results more sensible?

Why would a price of 1.49€, about 1.60$, round to 0.99$? Because the automatic only rounds to the standard tiers 0,99$, 1.99$. Why? This is insane and cost app developers (and Apple) probably millions of dollar.

I mean I probably could look into the api and write my own program to set prices but that is insanely user unfriendly and would probably cost me hours or days and thousand of other apple developers too. Instead Apple should provide such an app or just go the easy and user friendly alternative and allow the upload of csv files or allow templates like Google Play has.

Or Apple could just just fix the automatic prices so that it rounds to sensible tiers, not the arbitrary Apple standard tiers that have no intermediate levels between 0.99$ and 1.99$.

Why would a price of 1.49€, about 1.60$, round to 0.99$? Because the automatic only rounds to the standard tiers 0,99$, 1.99$. Why?

I've checked the docs: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-app-pricing/set-a-price

Automatically generated prices account for foreign exchange rates and certain taxes, and follow the most common pricing convention for each country or region.

(My emphasis.)

So the rationale is that they are using "common pricing conventions", i.e. in the USA it is common for prices to be $xx.99 but elsewhere xx.95 or xx.00 are more common, and Apple are doing us a favour by doing this so that we don't have to know what these conventions are.

I guess that maybe it's true that a customer in the US will look at a price like $1.60 and say to themselves "What the **** is $1.60? That's not a proper price! I'm not paying that. Why can't it be a proper price like $0.99 or $1.99 like everything else I buy?". But I doubt it. I don't really think that Apple is doing us a favour by rounding to these "common pricing conventions".

Most importantly, it seems that they are rounding up or down to these prices. I would worry less if they were always rounding up to a "common pricing convention" price, but rounding down to $0.99 could remove all profit for some of my IAP items.

Do file a bug!

I've filed FB13529395; slightly edited below:

Automatically generated prices round down to $x.99, eliminating my profit!

If I set the price of an app or an IAP to GBP 1.39, with the "base country or region" set to United Kingdom, and enable automatic pricing for all other regions, then App Store Connect selects a price for the USA of USD 0.99.

Proceeds from the GBP 1.39 sale are GBP 0.98. Proceeds from the USD 0.99 sale are USD 0.84. The current exchange rate is approx. USD 1 = GBP 0.79, so the US proceeds equal GBP 0.66.

So my proceeds from a sale in the US are approximately two thirds of my proceeds from a sale in the UK.

This is not what I expected from "automatic pricing". I had expected that this mode would set worldwide prices such that my proceeds would be almost equal from all regions.

This was never an issue under the old, pre-2023 system; I therefore consider it a regression and a bug.

It seems that the issue stems from your idea of "common pricing conventions", i.e. the idea that in the USA and elsewhere prices "commonly" are $x.99, and you round to these prices. I believe you need to change this:

1. When the price that I've chosen in the "base country or region" is not a "round" price, there is no reason why the prices automatically selected for other countries should be round. If I chose a "not-round" base price, you should definitely consider using "non-round" automatic prices. (Though if I have chosen a "round" price, that may only be by chance, not by design.)

2. When rounding prices, you should round up, not down! Or, not round down by more than a small and disclosed amount (e.g. 5%).

3. You would probably want to make some of this configurable, since some users will have got used to the present system.

4.. This discovery came as a considerable surprise to me. I suggest that these aspects of the behaviour of automatic pricing needs to be better documented, and the web interface should present warnings i.e. "Warning: automatic proceeds range from -X% to +Y% compared to base price depending on country/region".

I am now faced with the prospect of changing from automatic to manual pricing. This is a huge pain as it means that I need to track exchange rates and regularly update all my prices.

Here's a quote from the docs:

Automatic price updates help your global earnings stay consistent, customers aren’t incentivized to seek lower prices on certain storefronts, and pricing mistakes are reduced.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

I really looks like a bug. I have send a feedback too. First time I tried, in typical Apple way feedback needs an extra app. I spoke about this in a developer forum and they all were horrified, most developers seem not to be aware of this issue and just trusted Apple with the automatic prices.

I see that Apple have updated my feedback report to say "Investigation Complete - Unable to diagnose with current information".

I've only just seen this - I didn't get an email.

There is, obviously, more than enough information in the report for them to understand the problem. It has a complete example as shown above.

@erdenkriecher , any response to your feedback?

I have not the time to research this thing further. Because sales on a Apple devices are only a small part of my sales (for me Android is much bigger). So I do it like most developers and just raise prices on Apple devices, so if a price is 1.49$ on other platforms I raise it to 1.99$ for Apple devices, so Apples buggy price automatic don't make the price to low.