What Currency Are You Actually Billed In — And Why the Same Price Is Three Different Prices

Software pricing pages are written in one currency and read in dozens. What happens in between is rarely explained, occasionally expensive, and almost never part of a comparison.

We read four tracked vendors' own pricing pages on 1 August 2026 with one question: what currency will I actually be charged in, and is the number on the page the number I pay?

Four vendors gave four completely different answers, and only one of them lets you choose.

1. The same digits in three currencies

Deputy publishes this, verbatim:

"there is a minimum monthly spend of USD $30/AUD $30/GBP £20 per month per invoice on our monthly Lite, Core & Pro plans from September 1, 2025."

And separately:

"Customers located in Australia and New Zealand will be billed in Australian Dollars, customers in the United Kingdom will be billed in British Pounds, and those in the United States and all other countries will be billed in US Dollars."

Read the first quote as an operator: thirty US dollars, thirty Australian dollars, twenty pounds. Those are not conversions of one another. They are three different real prices with the same shape.

Apply today's rates yourself — we are not going to quote an exchange rate that will be stale by the time you read this — and the ranking is not the one people assume. A US business pays the highest real floor of the three. An Australian business pays the lowest.

And the second quote is the one that matters if you are in the EU: Australia, New Zealand and the UK get their own currency. Everywhere else — including every euro-zone country — is billed in US dollars.

That means an Irish, German or Dutch buyer carries two things a British buyer does not: the exchange rate on the day of each monthly charge, and whatever cross-border or currency fee their card issuer adds on top. Neither appears on the pricing page, because neither is the vendor's charge.

2. One currency, take it or leave it

Timetastic's published prices are in pounds only: "£1.20 per user/month" for the standard plan and "£2 per user/month" for Pro. No dollar or euro figure is offered.

This is the honest version of the same situation, and there is nothing wrong with it — a UK company charging in pounds is not doing anything strange. But if you are budgeting from outside the UK, the number in your accounts will not match the number on the page, and it will be a slightly different number every month.

3. A European company that prices in dollars

FoodDocs — a food-safety product built for European compliance regimes — publishes its plans in US dollars: "$99 Per site / month" for Lite, or "$79" billed annually; Standard "$199" or "$167" annual; Professional "$299" or "$250" annual.

And the line underneath: "Prices are exclusive of VAT."

For a European buyer that is two adjustments to the same headline number — a currency conversion, then VAT on top at a national rate that ranges from the high teens to the high twenties.

Be careful how you count the VAT, though, because the honest answer depends on who you are. A VAT-registered business generally recovers it, so the real cost is cashflow and paperwork rather than the rate itself. A business below the registration threshold — which is a great many of the small operators this software is sold to — does not recover it, and simply pays it. So "ex. VAT" is a genuinely different sentence depending on the size of the reader, and the pricing page cannot tell you which one you are.

And one more line on that page that belongs in any comparison and never appears in one: the Standard and Professional plans carry onboarding implementation fees of $999 and $1,249. A four-figure one-time charge does not fit in a column headed "monthly price," so it lives outside every comparison table ever built.

4. The one that localises properly

*Zoho Expense's pricing page offers currency selection — USD, EUR and several others — with the same "Prices are exclusive of local taxes"* caveat.**

This is what good looks like: pick your currency, see your number, budget from it. It is also, out of the four vendors we read, the only one that does it.

On annual billing the figures read cleanly — $3/user Standard and $5/user Premium, a 5-user minimum, free plan up to 3 users — but when we read the page, its monthly tier figures were internally inconsistent, so we quote only the annual ones here.

We would rather leave that gap visible than publish a number we do not trust, which is the same standard we apply to every figure in the Price Observatory.

What this does to a comparison

Every price-comparison table, including ours, has a column headed with a currency. For a buyer outside that currency, three things sit between the column and their bank statement:

1. The billing currency the vendor assigns you, which is decided by your country and not by your preference.
2. The exchange rate on each charge date, which moves, and the card fee on top of it, which is your bank's and not the vendor's.
3. Tax treatment, which depends on whether you can recover it.

None of those are hidden fees and none of them are anybody behaving badly. They are simply the reason a published price is a starting point rather than an amount.

The practical version

Three checks before you sign anything priced in a currency that is not yours:

1. Find the sentence that says which currency you will be billed in. If the page does not have one, assume the currency shown on the page, and assume your bank adds a fee.
2. Check for a minimum. Deputy's floor is published in three currencies with the same digits — that is a real price difference by geography, and it is the kind of thing you only find by reading the FAQ.
3. Check whether the price is stated with or without tax, and whether you can recover it. For a small unregistered business, "ex. VAT" can be the largest single adjustment on the page.

The honest counterweight

A one-time licence has the same currency problem on the day you buy it, and then never again. That is a genuine and rarely-stated advantage of buying once: one conversion, on one day, at a rate you can see before you click. A subscription converts every month for as long as you hold it, and you will not notice the drift.

But do not overrate it. The currency line is small compared with the subscription-versus-licence arithmetic itself, and if a hosted tool is the right answer for your business, an exchange rate should not talk you out of it. We would rather you bought the right tool in the wrong currency than the wrong tool in the right one.

Next steps

• The SaaS Price Observatory — every price quoted in the currency the vendor published it in, with the date read
• Expensa — our expense app keeps a separate total per currency and never adds USD and EUR into one misleading number, which is the same discipline this article asks of pricing pages
• The fee stack nobody reads — the other set of numbers underneath the headline price
• Rent or own — the five-year math with both sides priced properly

Every price and policy quotation above is taken from the named vendor's own pricing page, read 1 August 2026. No exchange rate is quoted anywhere on this page, deliberately — any rate we printed would be wrong by the time you read it.