India is the graveyard of lazy pricing strategies. For decades, Silicon Valley boardrooms looked at a market of 1.4 billion people. They calculated massive revenue projections. Yet, they hit a brick wall upon entry.
Their assumption is usually simple: take the US product, convert dollars to rupees, discount it slightly, and wait for cash.
This strategy rarely works. Anupam Mittal recently broke down why global tech giants misread the subcontinent. Mittal is the founder of Shaadi.com and an investor on Shark Tank India. His verdict is direct: India ruthlessly exposes weak pricing. Multinationals keep learning this lesson the hard way.
The Dollar-to-Rupee Delusion
When global tech companies initially pushed their standard pricing models into India, they didn’t anticipate the pushback. Indian consumers didn’t just reject the prices; they actively engineered ways around them.
Mittal pointed out that this resistance took the form of password sharing, manipulating extended free trials, and classic jugaad workarounds specifically designed to avoid paying for software that wasn’t deemed absolutely essential.
When a multinational corporation steps into this market, they aren’t just competing with local startups.
They are competing with the Indian consumer’s innate drive to maximize utility while minimizing spend. Mittal highlighted a core philosophy that dictates purchasing behaviour across the country: “Bhai, isse mera kya hoga?” (Brother, what exactly is in it for me?).
If a product cannot answer that question immediately and tangibly, the wallet stays shut. Mittal learned this firsthand during the early days of building Shaadi.com.
He realized that India cannot simply be treated as a lower-priced clone of the United States. Indian consumers don’t just want cheaper alternatives; they expect vastly more value for their money.
If a platform doesn’t become indispensable to their daily lives, they will simply bypass it. This intense demand for extreme value is precisely what forced massive disruptions in sectors like telecom and digital payments, pushing companies to innovate entirely new business models rather than relying on standard subscriptions.
AI Companies Face the Indian Value Test
History is now repeating itself with the latest technology wave: Artificial Intelligence. As the world’s biggest AI firms ship advanced language models and generative tools, they are attempting to push standard global subscription tiersoften around $20 a month onto Indian users.
According to Mittal, these AI firms are currently getting “schooled in value.” A $20 (roughly ₹1,650) monthly fee for a digital tool is a massive ask in a market accustomed to getting premium entertainment, cloud storage, and unlimited mobile data combined for a fraction of that cost.
Consequently, AI companies are quietly being forced to introduce India-specific plans, heavily discounted tiers, and localized features just to build a paying user base.
Mittal noted that this exact consumer behavior previously forced the evolution of the entertainment and payments sectors. Now, AI is getting its turn in the crucible. To survive and actually generate revenue here, global tech must stop forcing Indian consumers to adapt to Western pricing tiers.
The scale of the Indian market remains an irresistible prize, but unlocking it requires building a business model that clearly and constantly proves its worth, one rupee at a time.
Source: Official The Indian Express, "‘India Isn’t a Cheaper Version of US’: Anupam Mittal Explains Why Global Tech Companies Struggle in India"
