Do African products need African pricing?

I've been thinking about this a lot since I made my last post on "Is 'building for Africa' becoming a trap?".

We often talk about building products for the African market, but maybe we don't spend enough time thinking about how those products should be priced.

When disposable income is limited, a $10 or $20 monthly subscription can be a difficult decision, even when the product genuinely solves a problem.

But I don't think the answer is simply "make it cheaper."

We're paying global prices for cloud infrastructure, APIs, AI models and other tools to build these products, so the economics still have to work for the builder.

Maybe we need pricing models that better reflect how money actually moves here, whether that's annual plans, usage-based pricing, pay-per-transaction, bundles, group plans or something we haven't figured out yet.

If we want more African products to be adopted by Africans, maybe pricing itself needs to be part of the localisation.