The cheapest country for subscriptions, measured properly
Published · figures update with the dataset, last · methodology
Ask the internet for the cheapest country for subscriptions and you'll get the same answer everywhere: Turkey. That answer is out of date more often than not, because it's based on whichever single service the writer checked, in whatever month they checked it.
We measured it instead. For each of the 46 countries in our dataset, we took every service tracked there (26 subscriptions in total), divided its local price by that service's global median, and averaged the results. Call it the Subscription Price Index: 100 means a country pays exactly the global median; 60 means 40% below. The full ranking lives on the countries page and refreshes with every data update.
The top five, as of May 2026
| # | Country | Price index | vs global median |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 🇪🇬 Egypt | 28 | −72% |
| 2 | 🇳🇬 Nigeria | 35 | −65% |
| 3 | 🇦🇷 Argentina | 37 | −63% |
| 4 | 🇵🇰 Pakistan | 42 | −58% |
| 5 | 🇹🇷 Turkey | 43 | −57% |
Egypt takes it; Turkey is currently #5. The pattern behind the top five is consistent: large populations, weaker currencies, and providers pricing against local incomes rather than against the dollar.
At the other end, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom pay the most — Norway runs 57% above the global median. Between the two extremes the same set of subscriptions differs by roughly 5.7×.
Where the single-country answer breaks down
No country wins everything. Egypt leads the index, but open any service page and you'll find services whose own cheapest country is somewhere else entirely — pricing teams don't coordinate across companies. If you only care about two subscriptions, check those two pages and pick the country that wins for them; the index is for people optimizing the whole bill.
A second caveat: the index measures price, not convenience. A country can be cheap and still be a poor signup target if local checkouts reject foreign cards. In practice the top of our ranking overlaps heavily with the countries whose checkouts are known to be workable (payment guide here), which is part of why the same handful of countries keep showing up in VPN-signup guides.
Using it
Signing up from a cheaper country takes a VPN connection at signup and a payment method the local checkout accepts — the full walkthrough is here, including the terms-of-service tradeoff that comes with it. The short version: it's contractually grey, legally boring, and the realistic worst case is being asked to move your account back to your real region.
Every figure in this article is computed from our dataset at build time — when prices change, the article changes. Nothing here is legal or financial advice.