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 (read 3 September 2026):
"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, as served to a UK reader on 1 August 2026, 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 was offered on that page to that reader — a 3 September 2026 re-read from a non-UK exit was served dollars instead, "$1.50 per user per month" for the standard plan (named Business on the page) and "$2.50" for Pro, which is the same mechanism seen from the other side. The Price Observatory holds the dollar figures the same vendor shows elsewhere, read 21 July 2026, which is itself the point of this article.
The 5 September 2026 re-read makes the mechanism visible rather than inferred. Served to us that day, the page showed *dollars only — "$1.50"* Business, "$2.50" Pro and "$5.50" for Rota & Time Clock — with no currency selector anywhere. But the structured data at the foot of the same page still carries the sterling figures, 1.20 and 2.00 GBP. The page is holding both prices and showing one, chosen for us by where we appeared to be standing.** That is not a criticism — it is simply the thing this article says happens, caught in the act on a page we had already quoted.
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 (read 3 September 2026): "$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: under "Onboarding implementation fee" the table charges $999 on Lite and $1,249 on Standard, with Enterprise quoted (re-read 5 September 2026). A four-figure one-time charge does not fit in a column headed "monthly price," so it lives outside every comparison table ever built.
An earlier version of this page put those two fees on Standard and Professional. They sit one tier lower than that, and the correction matters more than a correction usually does — because it means the cheapest plan on the page carries the onboarding fee too. Lite is $79 per site per month on annual billing, which is $948 for a year; the onboarding fee is $999. The one-time charge to begin exceeds the first twelve months of the subscription, on the entry tier, and appears on no comparison table anywhere including the one further up this page.
4. The one that localizes properly
We had described this page as offering currency selection. On a careful 5 September 2026 re-read it does not, and the distinction turns out to be the interesting part. There is no currency dropdown. What sits at the foot of the page is a "Select Edition" control, reading "United States", listing sixteen national editions — Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Germany, India, Kenya, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, U.A.E., the United Kingdom and the United States — each of which is a different site, not a different view of this one. The same "Prices are exclusive of local taxes" caveat runs underneath.
The mechanism does work: the UK edition prices in pounds (read 5 September 2026). But look at what it prices. Annual billing reads £3 per user for Standard and £5 for Premium — against $3 and $5 on the US edition. The same digits, in a currency worth more. That is precisely the pattern section 1 of this article describes at Deputy, and we had filed this vendor as the counter-example to it.
So the honest verdict is narrower than the one we published. Zoho localizes properly in the sense that matters most — a British buyer sees pounds, is billed in pounds, and carries no conversion risk. It does not follow that the British buyer pays the American price. (The UK edition's monthly-billed figures did not render cleanly to us on that read, so only the annual pair is quoted here.)
One gap this article had left open can now be closed. We previously wrote that Zoho's monthly tier figures were internally inconsistent and quoted only the annual ones. Read on 5 September 2026 they are consistent: $4 per user Standard and $6 Premium billed monthly, against $3 and $5 billed annually, with the free plan holding three users. We are recording that the gap closed rather than quietly filling it in, because a reader who took our earlier caution seriously deserves to know it has been lifted.
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:
- The billing currency the vendor assigns you, which is decided by your country and not by your preference.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 license 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-license 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 minimum spend — Deputy's three-currency floor, and five other floors, worked out
- 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
Try the Expensa demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
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.