How to price your app or SaaS in naira

Price in naira when your customers are here. A dollar price makes people do sums with this week's exchange rate before they decide, and that's one more reason to close the tab. It also costs you more to collect. Paystack charges 1.5% plus ₦100 on a local payment, and 3.9% plus ₦100 on an international card.¹

Dollars make sense when most of your customers are abroad. Plenty of builders do both, naira for Nigeria and dollars for everyone else. The app stores already work this way. Apple lets subscription apps pick one home storefront and generate prices for the other 174 from it, or set each one by hand.⁴ Google Play creates local prices from your default price, the exchange rate and local pricing patterns.⁵ Look at what it picked for Nigeria before you accept it.

Start by working out what one customer costs you each month: hosting, SMS, emails, payment fees, support time. Charge less than that and every new customer makes you poorer.

But that number is the floor. A bakery in Ibadan paying for your stock app doesn't compare you with your hosting bill. It compares you with the bread that goes missing every week, or the hours someone spends counting it. Ask a few customers what the problem costs them now, in naira or in time, and price well under that. If your app saves a shop ₦40,000 a month, ₦5,000 is an easy yes. ₦500 tells them it probably doesn't work.

Start with monthly. It's a smaller yes, and within a few months it shows you whether people stay. Add a yearly plan once you have customers who've paid three or four months in a row, and give them a reason to switch. Two months free is common and easy to explain. Money paid up front for a year also helps when some of your own costs are in dollars and the naira moves.

If you use Paystack, plans can renew daily, weekly, monthly, every three or six months, or yearly. Subscriptions only work with cards and, in Nigeria, direct debit.² Plenty of people here would rather pay by bank transfer than save a card, so decide how you'll serve them. A simple answer is a manual monthly payment with a WhatsApp reminder a few days before.

When an automatic charge fails, Paystack marks the subscription as needing attention and tells your server.² What happens next is up to you. Send a polite email, give a few days of grace, and only then lock the account.

Paystack's local fee is 1.5% plus ₦100. The ₦100 is waived on payments under ₦2,500, and the fee never goes above ₦2,000 per payment.¹ On a ₦3,000 monthly plan, that's ₦145.

You can pass fees on to customers with a setting in your Paystack dashboard, or raise your price to cover them.³ For a subscription, covering them yourself is cleaner. Nobody enjoys a ₦3,000 plan that turns into ₦3,145 at checkout.

Pick a number and say it out loud to ten people who have the problem. If nobody hesitates, it's too low. If everyone says no, find out whether it's the price or the product, because those need different fixes.

Round naira prices read better than odd ones. ₦2,500 or ₦5,000 looks like a decision. ₦2,437 looks like you converted from dollars. Apple has allowed round price endings since 2022, so you aren't stuck with prices ending in 99.⁴

Keep it to one or two plans at the start. A free trial with an end date often works better than a free plan that lasts forever. A forever plan can fill your database with people who will never pay, while the people who would have paid stay on it too.

You'll probably have to. Some of your costs are in dollars, and those rise in naira terms whenever the exchange rate moves the wrong way. Raising prices is normal. Doing it by surprise is what upsets people.

Tell customers at least a month ahead. Give the reason in one sentence, like “our hosting and SMS costs have doubled since January”. Let current customers keep the old price for a few months, or for good if they were with you from the start. Those first users trusted you before anyone else did.

New customers can start on the new price straight away. If many of them still say yes, the old price was too low.

On Prow: Posting your project on Prow is free. When customers pay you through Paystack or Flutterwave, you can send Prow screenshots of your dashboard. A person at Prow checks them, and your project page then shows your last 30 days of revenue as checked by Prow. Prow never asks for your Paystack or Flutterwave keys, because keys can move money. Only revenue read straight from Stripe counts as Verified on the leaderboard. If you later sell, listing costs a one-off fee (Early-stage ₦10,000, Basic ₦25,000), and when it sells you and the buyer each pay Prow 1.5%, at least ₦5,000 each. The money is held in escrow with EscrowPay, whose own fee is split between you.

• Customers in Nigeria see one price, in naira.
• You know what one customer costs you each month, and you price well above it.
• The price comes from what the problem costs your customer.
• Monthly first, yearly once people have stayed.
• Payment fees are inside the price, not added at checkout.
• Price rises come with a month's notice and a reason.