Regional GPU pricing without confusing the comparison

A headline rate, then the regions

If a GPU costs different amounts in different regions, publish one headline rate for the card and a separate table of regional rates beneath it, each row naming its region. The headline rate is what gets compared with other providers; the table is for the buyer who already knows where their data must live. Mixing the two into one list of rates for the same card makes the provider look like it has a price range it does not have.

Say which region the headline rate is for, or that it is the rate in every region. A headline without that is a number whose scope a buyer has to guess.

Most of what follows is about the reader on the other side of the comparison: the buyer, the analyst, or the assistant that lifts a single figure from your page and sets it beside a rival’s. Each of them needs to know, from the line they copied, which place the figure belongs to.

What regional rows did to a comparison on this site

When the first study on this site set out to measure how far one card’s price varies between sellers, it compared headline on-demand rates and kept regional rows out. Letting them in would have widened the spread for reasons of geography rather than competition, and the result would have described where data centres are rather than how sellers price.

The median spread across the 29 cards now compared is 3.7×, measured on that same basis. A provider whose page lists the same card at several regional rates, with no headline, hands every reader the same problem the study had to solve: which of these numbers is the one to compare.

How buyers misread a list of regional rates

A buyer scanning for the lowest rate takes the lowest row. When that row is a cheaper region, the buyer compares it with a rival’s headline rate and you look cheap, until they find the region is on the wrong continent for their data. If it is the dearest row that a quick reader takes, perhaps because it appears first, you look dear for a reason that applies only to one place.

Neither reading is the one the provider wanted. Both come from a list in which rows for one product differ only by a location in small print.

Order regional rows by region name, not by price, and put the region in the first column. Sorting by price turns a regional table into an advert for the cheapest region, and hides the location behind the figure.

Choosing the headline rate

There is no single right choice, but there is an honest one: pick a rule and say what it is. The rate in your largest region, the rate most buyers pay, or the lowest rate available to any buyer are all defensible if the page names the rule. A headline that silently picks the cheapest region is defensible only until a buyer notices.

Keep the headline stable. If it switches between regions as rates change, a buyer comparing last month with this month sees movement that is really a change of region. The GPU price index tracks how listed rates move over time, and a headline that changes its meaning between reads makes that history harder to trust for everyone.

Whatever rule you pick, apply it to every card. A headline that is the cheapest region for one card and the largest region for another makes the provider’s own cards hard to compare with each other, before any rival is involved.

What a regional table needs

Region name in the form buyers know, with a city or country beside an internal code. The card, named exactly. The rate per GPU per hour, with its commitment. And a date, because regional rates change at different times and a table with one date for every row may be wrong for some of them.

If a card is not offered in a region at all, leave the row out or say "not offered". A blank cell or a dash will be read as either free or unknown, and neither is right.

Regional tables are also where availability questions bite hardest, because a card may be listed in a region where it is rarely free. That is a separate line to state, covered in its own post, and not something a regional rate can say on its own.

Currency and tax are regional too

A provider that prices regions in local currency adds a second conversion to every comparison. State the currency beside each rate, not once at the top of the page, and if the headline rate is in US dollars while a region bills in euros, say which is the binding figure. Comparisons across providers here are of listed rates as published; a buyer converting currencies brings their own exchange rate and their own errors.

Tax is the same problem. A rate that includes tax in one region and excludes it in another looks like a regional price difference and is not one. Pick one treatment for the whole table and write it at the top and again under it, because a buyer who prints the table should not lose the line that says what the numbers include.

Neither of these needs a long explanation. They need a word on the row, and a word in the same place on every row.