About $1,100/month across 48 subscriptions, roughly half of them European. Hosting and everything else is $46/month. When I finally read the fee breakdown properly there is a separate conversion line that was bigger than that.
Is this just the cost of selling internationally, or is there a setup I am missing?
Gently: at $1,100 in revenue this is a couple of tens of dollars a month. You have found an optimisation that is real, verifiable and satisfying to fix, which is precisely why it is dangerous - it feels like work and it is not sales. Set a reminder to revisit at $10k and go find customer 49.
Right about the amount, wrong about the effort, which is the part that decides it. Adding a settlement currency is not a project you have to schedule around, it is an afternoon of forms. Cheap enough that 'it is only $20 a month' is not really an argument against doing it once and never thinking about it again.
Showing prices in the customer's own currency lifted my European conversion enough to cover the FX several times over, and it removed a support thread I used to get every month - 'why did my bank charge me an extra fee, is your pricing wrong'. Local currency is a conversion decision that happens to have a fee attached, not a fee decision.
Also check whether you are paying the international card fee on charges you assumed were domestic. It is decided by where the card was issued, not by the billing address the customer typed, so a US-resident customer with a card from their home country counts as international and you would never know from your own database.
Charge in the customer's currency, settle in the same currency wherever you can, and stop reading the monthly total. The per-charge effective rate on your cheapest plan is the only number that tells you anything.
@visa_run_val · 5mo ago
Three options in increasing order of effort.
One, price only in USD and let the customer's bank do the conversion. Simplest, costs you nothing directly, and pushes an unpredictable rate onto the buyer plus occasionally a foreign transaction fee on their side.
Two, add euro as a settlement currency with a receiving account in that currency so euros stay euros until you decide to convert them, then move them yourself when you want to. This is a form and a bank account, not a project.
Three, do nothing and treat it as cost of sale.
I switched to two when the conversion line passed about $150 a month, and in hindsight I would have done it earlier because the work was one afternoon.
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