a pretty awesome Asia life-hack for people that travel back and forth a lot

When I first moved to Thailand, smartphones and the associated apps that come along with it were not so much a part of people's lives. Smartphones existed, sure, but the companies hadn't really started trying to monetize apps the way that they do now. I am not an app heavy user but one thing that I really like on my phone and is basically the only thing I use outside of various messengers is Spotify, which I think is just amazing.

I pay for a Spotify account here in Thailand and never really thought about the monthly fee until I started talking to people from other countries that also have Spotify and what they pay.

As far as I know there is only one level of membership to Spotify, but I could be wrong about that. With my membership I get every song ever written by anyone on demand without ever hearing or seeing ads. I think that all memberships are this way. When I first started using Spotify I had a free account and was willing to deal with the advertisement every 3 songs but after a while I started to get annoyed at certain features like not being able to choose an individual song or even if you can do that, you only get to do it a certain amount of times per day and you cannot save a tracklist either.

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This probably comes as very little surprise to most people, but the makers of various apps charge different prices for these apps based on what country the person using the app is based out of. I knew that something like this existed when years ago I got my hands on a copy of Windows something or other for under $50 from someone selling the copies, I presume illegally, online. When the package arrived it was a genuine Windows product, but the sticker on the packaging was adamant that this software was NOT to be sold outside of India. The fact that I was in Texas meant that the same product, in the same packaging, was 5x as much.

So the other day I was speaking to a British friend of mine who still maintains a phone number in the UK and therefore all of his apps are tied to that number, and that country. He pays 12 pounds a month for Spotify. I have a Thai phone number and a Thai bank account and my Spotify account is 35 THB per month, this is just over $1. There is no justification for this much higher rate other than the fact that Spotify as well as other companies are very aware of two things:

• They can get away with charging more for something in wealthier countries
• If they had the wealthy country price in the poorer country almost nobody would subscribe to it

It's a little mean but I hate to point it out to you folks but the people at Spotify and other app companies probably don't give a good gravy damn about getting anyone access to music, they are in the business of making money and as much of it as possible.

I looked it up and the most expensive place in the world for a Spotify membership is $16.11 a month in Switzerland. The cheapest place in the world is Nigeria where it is 66 cents a month. Wildly different pricing schemes huh?

Well we later talked to a mutual friend who lives 6 months in Europe and 6 months in Thailand every year and he told us about this app-hack that I can't believe all of us didn't think of beforehand.

He got a really cheap Thai phone in Thailand, something that barely functions as a phone and he only uses it for a very specific purpose: To get apps and sign up for them under the "Thai price" as opposed to the price he would be subjected to back in Ireland. To make this happen, he signs up for the lowest possible phone plan on his phone which comes to about $2.50 a month. While I am not sure of the details he has very limited data allowance but he can send 20 SMS a month internationally and receive an unlimited number of them.

He signs up for Spotify and other pay apps on this cheap phone that he never uses in order to establish ownership of the account and then opens the same app on his other phone using the login details provided by the initial membership. I am unaware of any apps that have a verification system beyond this because you actually ARE entitled to use Spotify as well as other memberships on multiple devices, it would be impossibly difficult for them to do it any other way.

He also has a Netflix account based out of Thailand on this same phone and it is under $9 a month as opposed to over $16 a month. There are other apps that he uses such as a VPN and other things that he mentioned but let's just say that the cost of the phone, which was around $100 or so, and the $2.50 a month that he spends to be able to receive SMS verifications, has long since paid for itself as far as these memberships are concerned.

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I'm not expert, but I am miserly. There are very few apps that I will actually pay for but Spotify is one of them. There are workarounds for almost anything such as using a Brave browser instead of paying for YouTube premium but I am not aware of any workaround for a genuine Spotify membership.

The fact is that a lot of the cost of apps or ever software is determined by the country that the phone number and bank account are associated with and if you do travel to another country and can endure the cost of a cheap phone that is used only for verification purposes, you could be paying substantially less for your monthly membership fees.

For me, my Spotify works all around the world and they never ask for verification that it is actually me but if they did, they do have a web portal for me to allow certain devices. Just remember that while you CAN share this account, you can't have 2 people using it at the same time.

I would imagine that Spotify and other apps have something buried in the TOS that says you are not allowed to do this but honestly, are they going to bother to dig that much?