Affordable price with Purchasing Parity Power

So I’ve been wanting to get the Dracula UI for a while. Since I was building up my personal blog now, and I really doesn’t want to just follow the default that comes with the theme, so I decided to get the palette from it, and see if I can make it work on my blog.

Just when I’m about to hit the buying button, this lovely banner bumps into my eyes:

I honestly don’t recall seeing that before, because 51% off is a huge price gap that should have made me buy it without a doubt when I first saw it. Nevertheless, before I make my way to checkout, I thought this is a good chance to try out the VPN subscription that I’ve been paying for a while. Although switching countries is just a click away, it’s still a bit of a hassle, so after playing around with some neighboring countries, I dive deep into the code to see if there’s anything I can facilitate. First I found an API endpoint at https://ppp.dracula.workers.dev, which is an API that responds the discount based on the client’s IP address. Good enough, but can be better.

🪄 Automate #

Then I suddenly realize, that the API is the single source of truth of the discount, since the merchant dealing the payment does not verify the code when the user is applying the code, and the code is just a country code suffix with the fixed string of UI, so I can just brute force the code with the ISO 3166-1 code.

Here is the results:

The results are rather interesting. If you compare the results with the List of countries by GDP (PPP) per Capita, you can see there are some mismatches:

• 🇸🇬 Singapore ranked with the 4th most purchasing power, but still has a 36% of discount
• Same goes with 🇭🇰 Hong Kong, ranked around 11th ~ 12th with a 23% of discount
• Many African has a high percentage of discount (e.g. 🇺🇬 Uganda has 69%), but some barely have any (🇱🇷 Liberia, 🇸🇴 Somalia). Although some might be due to the sanctions, that’s just my guess.

Conclusion #

After some Googling, I’ve also discovered that Gumroad itself had built-in support for location deals, with some customizable options. Therefore, judging from the results, the author of Dracula UI not only grants the discount based on the purchasing power, but the disproportionate discount for some countries also shows that he is probably also granting the discount to reach more users that the theme is not yet popular in.

Nevertheless, this is a good chance and opportunity for me to dig into more about the purchasing power of different countries. Moreover, this mechanism is also a good way to bring equality to the world as an individual, and I would like to see more people doing this.