Dynamic pricing means prices that change quickly with demand. EU law puts it in nearly those words: "changing the price in a highly flexible and quick manner in response to market demands".
Two other things are often called dynamic pricing too: a price set for one person, and a price set for one country. They follow other rules. We measured real examples on 11 October 2026.
Three ways a price can move
- By time. Dynamic or real-time pricing: demand rises, and the price follows. Electricity and concert tickets work this way.
- By person. Personalised pricing: software sets the price for you. In the EU, a shop must tell you when it does this.
- By place. The price differs by country or region, as it does on the App Store.
By the hour: one day of electricity
The day-ahead power market sets a price for every quarter hour of the next day. On Sunday 11 October 2026, the price for Germany and Luxembourg ranged from €13.78 per megawatt hour at 13:15 to €241.59 at 19:45. The peak was 17.5 times the low.
The grid explains the shape. At 13:15, solar plants fed in 24.1 GW and onshore wind 26.5 GW, while the country used 49.0 GW. At 19:45 solar fed in nothing, wind had dropped to 16.8 GW, and demand had risen to 51.5 GW.
This curve now reaches homes. Since 1 January 2025, German law has required every power supplier to offer a contract with dynamic tariffs to customers who have a smart meter (§ 41a EnWG). These are the wholesale prices of the day-ahead auction, not a household bill.
By the place: one app in 24 countries
We asked Apple's public lookup for five paid apps in 24 App Store countries, with no account and no proxy. Then we converted the prices to dollars at the European Central Bank's rates.
Four apps cost about the same everywhere. Procreate ran from $10.33 in India to $18.72 in Norway, 1.8 times as much. Stardew Valley, Things 3 and Geometry Dash stayed within 1.5 times. Minecraft did not:
Minecraft cost 22 times more in the UK than in India. Apple's documentation explains both patterns. A developer sets one base price, and Apple generates prices "across the other 174 storefronts and 43 currencies", with exchange rates and "certain taxes". Apple says this means "customers aren’t incentivized to seek lower prices on certain storefronts". But the same page adds: "Alternatively, you can choose to manually manage certain storefronts or you can manually manage them all." A gap of 22 times is far more than exchange rates and taxes explain, so Minecraft's prices in those countries look set by hand.
By the person: prices set for you
Prices set per person worry regulators most. The EU's words for it: pricing "based on automated decision-making and profiling of consumer behaviour". Since 28 May 2022, a shop in the EU must tell you "that the price was personalised on the basis of automated decision-making". Dynamic pricing without personalisation carries no such duty.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission looked at the firms that sell such tools. Its first findings, in January 2025, said that "a person’s precise location or browser history can be frequently used to target individual consumers with different prices for the same goods and services."
We did not test personalised prices: that takes accounts, histories and purchases.
Is dynamic pricing legal?
In the EU and the UK, yes, with rules about information.
- The EU requires a notice for personalised prices, not for dynamic ones. Its geo-blocking regulation forbids a shop to "block or limit a customer's access" to its site by nationality or residence. It still lets a shop set its own price per country "on a non-discriminatory basis".
- The UK investigated the Oasis ticket sale of 2024, "including how so-called ‘dynamic pricing' may have been used". The case closed on 25 September 2025 with undertakings, not a fine. Ticketmaster promised to "tell fans 24 hours in advance if a tiered pricing system is being used", and to show more about prices in the queue.
How to compare prices across countries
- Use the official country version. Many shops run a site per country, and Apple's lookup takes a country code. In the EU, a shop may not block you from its version for another country.
- See what a local visitor sees. Some sites pick the version by your address. A proxy in another country shows the page a visitor there gets. Our test of proxies and VPNs for cheaper flights shows how little that usually changes.
- Check who may buy. Seeing a price is not the same as paying it. Apple's App Store follows your account's country, and Apple says: "You might need to enter a valid payment method for your new country or region." The EU's equal-access rule also leaves out services built on copyright works, such as apps, games, music and ebooks.
- Read the terms before you automate it. Tracking prices with a program is scraping. In our reading of 20 well-known sites, 17 forbid scraping in their terms.
Where a proxy fits
A proxy changes the address a site sees, so it shows the page as a visitor from that country would. It does not change the price rules above, the store your account belongs to, or a site's terms. For price tracking on sites that allow it, our guides to an Amazon price tracker and to hotel prices show the setup.
What this page could not check
- One day of electricity prices, and a Sunday at that. Weekdays have a different shape.
- Five apps in 24 storefronts, read once. App prices change when developers or Apple's updates change them.
- We used the ECB's rates of 9 October 2026, the latest on a weekend, for prices read on 11 October.
- We did not test personalised prices, and we did not collect airline, hotel or shop prices.
- We will run both measurements again by 11 January 2027.
Sources
- Directive (EU) 2019/2161, recital 45 and Article 4, 27 November 2019: eur-lex.europa.eu.
- Regulation (EU) 2018/302 on geo-blocking, Articles 3 and 4, 28 February 2018: eur-lex.europa.eu.
- Energiewirtschaftsgesetz, read 11 October 2026: § 41a EnWG.
- Bundesnetzagentur | SMARD.de, day-ahead prices (CC BY 4.0), and public net power, through Fraunhofer ISE's API, read 11 October 2026: energy-charts.info.
- US Federal Trade Commission, surveillance pricing study, 17 January 2025: ftc.gov.
- UK Competition and Markets Authority, Ticketmaster consumer protection case, closed 25 September 2025: gov.uk.
- Apple Developer, App Store Connect help, Set a price, read 11 October 2026: developer.apple.com.
- Apple Support, Change your Apple Account country or region, read 11 October 2026: support.apple.com.
- European Central Bank, euro foreign exchange reference rates of 9 October 2026: ecb.europa.eu.
- Our own tests on our server, 11 October 2026: Apple's lookup API for five apps in 24 countries from 20:37 UTC, and the Energy-Charts API at 20:48 UTC.
