As someone working in technology and living in Australia yet with a high degree of involvement with tech companies in the USA, I’m reminded of the massive cost differences every day between the two countries for geeks like me. So Peter Martin‘s article Soft Touches Pay the Price in today’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald simply just rubs even further a sore nerve with me.

Peter explains how companies use price discrimination to maximise profits. For example, supermarkets that manipulate the merchandising of vegetables to ensure the well-heeled pay a little more.

Price discrimination has been alive and well in technology and online, and as the technology improves, so does the discrimination become more pronounced. Amazon can display different prices for the same book depending not only on where you live, but your past purchase history. Regular buyers are charged more than new customers, presumably operating on the presumption that you’ve become comfortable with the idea of online buying and don’t require additional encouragement.

Terry Lane covered the technology price differences between Australia and the USA more than a year ago in his article Software prices defy comparison across borders. He offered up several examples of software that Australians pay more for than US residents. I know this pain first hand. Here are a couple of examples I checked today for software I use every day to earn my income:

Microsoft Visual Studio (it’s a key tool in a software developer’s armory): In the Microsoft US online store it costs $US499. In their Australian store the price is $A724. Given our exchange rate is almost at parity, and to keep the math simple, that’s a 45% premium – for exactly the same product, probably downloaded to my computer from the same Microsoft server.

Adobe Creative Suite monthly subscription: costs $US49.99 in the USA and $A62.99 to mugs like me in Australia. Not quite as eye-watering a difference as Microsoft but still a 26% premium.

What is particularly irksome about Microsoft is they deliberately penalise people ‘in the trade’, technology workers like me. Purchasers of consumer products such as the Windows operating system, and the Office suite, appear to pay the same – I compared prices and the $US and $A price tags were the same.

The cost of doing business as an Australian technologist is not confined solely to the software we use of course. Another key expense (for those of us working from home or our own small business office) is internet access. Whenever I chat with US tech friends about the cost of internet and telecommunications in Australia the conversation usually ends with them rolling around on the floor laughing silly. Because Australians pay through the nose for internet access.

I just checked the Comcast web site in the USA, one of the mainstream internet, phone and cable TV providers. I can buy a 30Mbs (=pretty darn fast) cable internet connection, plus a big bundle of TV channels, for $US49.95. Here in Melbourne, I’m paying Telstra $99 a month for my ADSL connection, and another $100 a month for my cable TV. Oh, and Telstra caps my downloads to 200Gb a month – Comcast does not appear to have any restriction. Americans historically, I believe, have not had ‘caps’ or usage limits on internet and phone plans, so again my US colleagues convulse when I explain how my son or daughter has racked up a big ‘over cap’ bill for exceeding their data allowance for the month.

All of this presumably feeds into the serious cost of living differences between the USA and Australia. I found this Cost of Living Comparison Between United States and Australia, and I compared Melbourne and San Francisco, which shows an astounding cost differential. For example, basic utilities (Electricity, Gas, Water, Garbage) are 90% more expensive in Melborne.

This is the last time I’m paying any attention to my geek friends in San Francisco moaning about how it’s such an expensive city. Because if they feel ripped off they ain’t tried paying the price of being a self-employed technology worker in Australia.

Image from Flickr artist in doing nothing

This week we decided to cancel our eFax.com service. A few years ago eFax was a brilliant solution for us. It enables you to have a virtual fax receiving and sending service, with a phone number in your city, but without all the bother of actually installing and paying for another line in your office.

Reality sank in the other day when I wondered aloud just how many times we had used the $18 a month service in the past year or two. Answer? Pretty much none. Email surely has killed the fax.

We mostly only maintained a fax number for the odd occasion when we needed to exchange formal documents, for example exchange a signed contract. Nowadays for most minor documents people are happy if I just drop a scan of my signature onto a PDF. And for anything important there are brilliant services like DocuSign.

So I logged into my eFax account and cast around for the option to cancel my recurrent billing and close the account, without success. I emailed the support address and received a reply saying I needed to call eFax. I dutifully did this, and spoke to a friendly woman who after ascertaining I wanted to cancel my account immediately offered me a free three month subscription. This was AFTER I had answered her question “why do you want to close the account” by saying “because we haven’t used it in at least a year”. Which I thought was pretty clear.

The support person handled it perfectly gracefully after I declined the free subscription, and within minutes the account was closed.

But I got to wondering, just how many people actually take up the three month subscription, and when the recurrent billing kicks in again, don’t just ring again to cancel the account?

What’s the strike rate? How many customers does eFax retain as a result of putting us through this offline process? My guess is not a huge number. If I’ve rung to cancel the service it’s because I’ve decided to cancel the service. Not because I’m torn, or undecided.

I wonder if it’s all worth the effort when online businesses like eFax force us to deal with them offline when we want to end our relationship?

So I log into