Founders selling software in India routinely take a price that works in the US, convert it, apply a discount, and conclude that Indian buyers are unwilling to pay for software. The conclusion is wrong and the method is the reason. Indian buyers pay for software; they buy it on a different structure, with different expectations about what is included, and a converted-and-discounted foreign price satisfies none of them.
Start with per-seat pricing, which travels badly. Indian organisations frequently have more people touching a system than an equivalent Western company — more operations staff, more data entry, more supervisory layers — so a price that scales linearly with headcount reaches an unacceptable total faster here than the value does. Pricing on something the customer associates with their own revenue, such as transactions, orders, invoices or locations, aligns much better and removes the incentive for customers to share logins, which per-seat pricing reliably creates.
Expect annual rather than monthly, and expect it to be negotiated. Monthly self-serve billing is normal for very small purchases and unusual above a modest threshold — Indian buyers generally prefer an annual commitment with an invoice, a purchase order and a payment cycle, often with a discount attached. That has a cash flow implication in your favour and a sales implication against you: the deal involves a procurement conversation rather than a credit card, and your pricing page is an opening position rather than a price.
Free trials behave differently too. A self-serve fourteen-day trial that converts in Western markets often produces low-intent signups here, because evaluation is typically a supervised process involving a demonstration, a pilot with real data, and a champion inside the organisation who must justify the spend. A guided pilot with a defined success measure converts better than an unattended trial, and it costs sales time that must be priced into your model.
Be careful about the middle of your pricing table. A common failure is a well-designed entry tier, a well-designed enterprise tier, and a middle tier priced by splitting the difference, which then sells to nobody because it solves no one's problem completely. Build each tier around a coherent buyer — a five-person team, a fifty-person company, a multi-location enterprise — and check that each has a reason to upgrade that is about capability rather than about hitting an arbitrary limit.
The mistake worth avoiding above all is competing on being cheap. There is always somebody cheaper, and in this market there is always somebody willing to build a bespoke version for a one-time fee. The companies that hold price here do it by being unambiguously better at something the customer can name — support that answers, an integration nobody else has, domain knowledge the buyer can feel in the first demonstration. If you cannot name that thing, price is the only conversation left and it is not one you win.
