Chess.com Regional Pricing: A Case Study

What is Regional Pricing?

It is the goal of every business to maximise profits. As a business, it is your responsibility to price your products in a way that will yield the most profit. Price your product too low and you risk missing out on a significant amount of profit. Price your product too high and it won't be affordable for many potential customers. To address this issue, businesses use profit maximization to settle on an optimal price, which is the point where profit is highest while balancing price and demand.

Now, consider that many businesses have customers from all around the world. To maximise global profits, a business needs to adjust its prices in different regions based on each country’s purchasing power and other factors like taxes, shipping, and tariffs. This is critical because a price that is affordable in one country may be too expensive in another. Without adjusting for these differences, a business could either underprice or overprice in certain markets, reducing profits in both cases.

Many popular online services use regional pricing such as Netflix, Spotify, HBO Max, Disney+, YouTube Premium, Steam and Epic Games Store. In this article, I analyse the regional pricing strategy used by the popular online chess platform, Chess.com.

Chess.com Premium Membership

Chess.com offers several premium membership plans. There are standard monthly plans (Gold, Platinum, and Diamond) as well as cost-effective yearly plans (Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Family). These plans give your account access to several premium-only features such as unlimited Puzzles, Game Reviews, and Insights.

There are 7 total SKUs (distinct product plans) that Chess.com is currently selling:

• gold_monthly_032022
• platinum_monthly_032022
• diamond_monthly_032022
• gold_yearly_032022
• platinum_yearly_032022
• diamond_yearly_032022
• fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025

The fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025 SKU is particularly interesting. It belongs to the Family & Friends plan which Chess.com released in May 2025. This plan allows 6 people in total (you and 5 others) to join the plan and receive Diamond-level membership perks.

Unlike many other family plans, Chess.com allows you to invite members from anywhere in the world, not just those who live in the same household. However, in certain countries, you can only invite members who live in the same country as you. This restriction prevents users in low-price regions from adding members from higher-priced regions, which would reduce profits.

Here is the pricing I see when I access the membership page from my personal account in Australia:

Which got me thinking, what do prices look like in other countries? 🤔

How to Retrieve Regional Pricing

Location, Location, Location

The main piece of information Chess.com needs to show you a membership price is your physical location. They need to determine which country you are in. Some services use KYC (Know Your Customer) systems that require government ID checks, but these create friction and reduce conversions. I'm not exactly too keen on sending Chess.com a copy of my passport just so Coach David can tell me to Google en passant. Instead, Chess.com relies on a simpler method: your internet connection's IP address.

Your IP address is essentially a number assigned to you by your ISP or server provider that allows you to interface with other machines on the internet. An example of an IPv4 IP address is 198.51.100.1. Every IP address belongs to an IP block, which is assigned to ISPs by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) through regional registries. By looking up which ISP or organisation owns a block, it is often possible to determine the country associated with an IP. GeoIP databases, such as MaxMind, combine registry data, routing information, and other sources to provide a practical way to map IP addresses to countries.

Profile Country vs. Billing Country

On Chess.com, you can choose a country to display on your profile, which adds a small flag next to your name.

For example, here is Magnus Carlsen’s Norwegian flag:

It is important to note that this country is your profile country.

There is a separate, hidden billing country linked to your account, used solely for billing and membership pricing. This billing country cannot be manually set. It is automatically detected based on your IP address, account activity, and other identifying signals.

Spoofing Your Location with a VPN

Okay, enough talk, let's find out what the regional pricing is in a country where Chess is very popular like India.

First, I attempt to change my profile country on my account to the target country. Unfortunately, this makes no difference to the pricing on the membership page because my billing country is established to be Australia on my account.

Next, I’ll try spoofing my location with a VPN to change my IP address so the site sees me as coming from India.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t change the membership pricing because I’m logged into my Chess.com account. Therefore, my account's established billing country is used instead of my VPN location.

Now I’ll open an Incognito browser session with no cookies, local storage, or other tracking data. I will also not log into any Chess.com account. I connect to the VPN and visit the membership page. Interestingly, for some countries, like Germany, the correct local pricing is shown in the local currency (EUR), but for others, such as India, a generic fallback price appears in a different currency, like Singapore dollars (SGD).

It turns out that just using a VPN isn’t enough to see the pricing for a specific country. You also need an account from that region. No worries! I created a new account in a new Incognito session with an Indian IP address. This meant that my billing country was now set to India. Now I can finally see the correct pricing information for India in Indian Rupees (INR):

Fingerprinting Techniques

At this stage, I thought the job was done. I took a well-deserved break to bleed 200 Elo (33% of my overall Elo), before coming back later in the day to log into my Indian Chess.com account without a VPN to check the prices again. To my surprise, the membership page was now showing prices in my own currency, Australian Dollars (AUD)! No matter what I did, this account refused to show pricing in Indian Rupees (INR) again.

What just happened here is amazing! One of the major challenges Chess.com faces is dealing with cheaters. As part of their anti-cheating system, they perform extensive fingerprinting on devices, browsers, and IP addresses. For example, consider a titled player who creates a secret alt account to cheat. If they reuse the same IP or send the same browser cookies to Chess.com, the two accounts will become linked. The site can then take disciplinary action against the cheater on both accounts.

It seems Chess.com is also using this fingerprinting system to assign the billing country on an account. When I logged into my Indian Chess.com account without a VPN, I contaminated the account and Chess.com quickly assigned my older, established account’s billing country to the new account. This appears to be a sticky change because even a single visit from my Australian IP was enough to permanently update the billing country.

Another fascinating discovery is that while fresh accounts created using a VPN do show the correct pricing at first, they quickly become stale. It seems Chess.com may perform more extensive checks on an account’s IP address in the background to gain confidence in its location. After a few hours, these accounts appear to become stale and start showing pricing based on a fallback billing country, like the United States.

Chess.com uses these techniques to keep pricing data secret and prevent customers from subscribing to cheaper plans in other countries. Using a different region to get lower pricing is usually not illegal, but it violates the site's Terms of Service and can lead to account suspension.

Scraping Regional Pricing Data

I was ready to build a scraper to retrieve Chess.com’s regional pricing for every country my VPN supported.

As a prerequisite I manually created 126 Chess.com accounts, one for each country my VPN supported. Nobody tell Danny (Chess.com's Chief Chess Officer) I may have bent the single-account policy.

This tedious but manageable approach was preferred because automating account creation would require bypassing Cloudflare bot detection and captchas, which felt like overkill. Since the accounts needed to be fresh and uncontaminated, I ran my scraping script shortly after creating them.

The Python-based scraping tool performs the following steps for each country my VPN supports:

1. Connect to the country via VPN.
2. Log into the pre-created Chess.com account using Playwright to handle the JavaScript login flow.
3. Fetch and store all Chess.com cookies in a cookie jar.
4. Call an endpoint to retrieve the localised pricing for every SKU using the authenticated account.
5. Fetch the Friends & Family page HTML source to parse the isCrossBorderEligible flag.
6. Store the pricing data in a structured JSON file.
7. Disconnect from the VPN.
8. Sleep for 45 seconds to avoid VPN session rate limiting.

Here’s an example of the JSON data we fetched for India:

{
  "countryName": "India",
  "countryCode": "IN",
  "skus": {
    "gold_monthly_032022": {
      "sku": "gold_monthly_032022",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 168.64,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 1.9,
      "usdFxRate": 88.7911148
    },
    "platinum_monthly_032022": {
      "sku": "platinum_monthly_032022",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 295.76,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 3.33,
      "usdFxRate": 88.7911148
    },
    "diamond_monthly_032022": {
      "sku": "diamond_monthly_032022",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 465.25,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 5.24,
      "usdFxRate": 88.7911148
    },
    "gold_yearly_032022": {
      "sku": "gold_yearly_032022",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 1355.08,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 15.26,
      "usdFxRate": 88.7911148
    },
    "platinum_yearly_032022": {
      "sku": "platinum_yearly_032022",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 2117.8,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 23.85,
      "usdFxRate": 88.7911148
    },
    "diamond_yearly_032022": {
      "sku": "diamond_yearly_032022",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 3219.49,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 36.26,
      "usdFxRate": 88.791115
    },
    "fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025": {
      "sku": "fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025",
      "amountInCountryCurrency": 5507.63,
      "countryCurrency": "INR",
      "amountInUsd": 62.03,
      "usdFxRate": 88.791115
    }
  },
  "isCrossBorderEligible": false
}

You can see the price for each SKU in the local currency (amountInCountryCurrency), as well as the nominal value in USD (amountInUsd) using the usdFxRate. Note that the usdFxRate fluctuates daily with market rates. You can also see the isCrossBorderEligible flag, which determines whether you can add members to your plan from outside your country.

Here’s a time-lapse demo of the tool in action:

It usually takes a few runs to fetch data for all countries because VPN connections can be flaky and Chess.com’s Cloudflare anti-bot measures sometimes trigger.

Check out the code for this project: https://github.com/mobeigi/chesscom-prices

Regional Pricing Results

A World View

The choropleth map above shows the USD-equivalent price for each processed country for the diamond_yearly_032022 SKU. Memberships are cheapest in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and most expensive across Western Europe and Scandinavia. The pattern roughly mirrors local purchasing power.

Cheapest & Most Expensive Awards

And the award for the cheapest Chess.com memberships goes to 🥁🥁🥁🥁 COLOMBIA!

I have to apologise, there’s been a mistake…the real winners are:

• 📦 SKU: gold_monthly_032022
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $0.67 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇩🇰 Denmark (DK) - $9.42 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 14.06x
• 📦 SKU: platinum_monthly_032022
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $1.08 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇩🇰 Denmark (DK) - $14.14 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 13.09x
• 📦 SKU: diamond_monthly_032022
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $1.62 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇱🇺 Luxembourg (LU) - $23.43 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 14.46x
• 📦 SKU: gold_yearly_032022
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $3.10 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇮🇸 Iceland (IS) - $65.19 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 21.03x
• 📦 SKU: platinum_yearly_032022
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $4.93 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇮🇸 Iceland (IS) - $107.28 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 21.76x
• 📦 SKU: diamond_yearly_032022
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $7.42 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇩🇰 Denmark (DK) - $157.10 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 21.17x
• 📦 SKU: fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) - $12.48 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇩🇰 Denmark (DK) - $267.07 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 21.40x

🇳🇬 Nigeria (NG) sweeps the competition as the cheapest country across every SKU, while European countries 🇩🇰 Denmark (DK), 🇱🇺 Luxembourg (LU), and 🇮🇸 Iceland (IS) share the podium as the most expensive.

Friends & Family: Cross-Border Eligibility

Looking at the Friends & Family plan with SKU fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025, we found that out of the 126 countries explored, 47 were cross-border eligible while 79 were not. Only countries with higher purchasing power and correspondingly higher premium membership prices have cross-border eligibility enabled. This prevents users from exploiting cheaper regions, like Nigeria, to share memberships with friends in high-price countries such as the United States.

• 📦 SKU: fnf6_diamond_yearly_022025 (isCrossBorderEligible only)
• • 💸 Cheapest: 🇰🇼 Kuwait (KW) - $163.70 USD
  • 💰 Most Expensive: 🇩🇰 Denmark (DK) - $267.07 USD
  • 📊 Price Difference Ratio: 1.63x

So if you’re after the best cross-border Friends & Family plan deal, it’s time to make some friends with the Kuwaitis!

Regional Pricing Table

The table below shows pricing data for all 126 countries, accurate as of 1 October 2025.

Notes:

• All prices are shown in USD.
• Values may change with daily USD exchange rate fluctuations (usdFxRate).
• The vs US column shows the percentage difference for the Diamond Yearly plan relative to US pricing.
• You can also explore the raw JSON data files to view prices in each country’s local currency.