Jun 29, 2026
What 'Affordable by Design' Actually Means
A global price is a quiet exclusion.
Morocco’s guaranteed minimum wage, the SMIG, was 3,266.55 dirhams a month as of January 2025, rising to about 3,422.72 dirhams in January 2026. That is roughly 372 dollars for full-time work. Now take a standard international subscription at 10 to 15 dollars a month. That is about 3 to 4 percent of a full-time minimum wage income for one product. Subscribe to three and you are near 10 percent of everything you earn.
The industry already solved this, quietly.
Regional pricing is not a novel idea we invented. Netflix runs dozens of price points adjusted to local purchasing power. Across streaming services there is roughly a sevenfold gap between the most expensive market and the cheapest. Spotify Premium sells for around one to two dollars a month in India and Pakistan. And it works commercially: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania together accounted for 73 percent of Spotify’s new subscribers.
How we price.
Membership is tiered by what a member actually needs and can realistically pay, rather than published as one global number. And nobody should have to buy the top tier to get the thing they came for.
Subscription and one-time, not subscription only.
Not everything should be a recurring charge, and the industry’s drift towards making everything one is a revenue preference dressed up as a product decision. Some things you genuinely need continuously: community access, ongoing tools, updates. Other things you need once. A specific course. A specific tool for a specific project. Charging rent forever for a thing somebody consumed once is not a pricing model, it is a trap.
So we combine a low recurring membership with one-time purchases, which means the total a member spends tracks what they actually used.
Partnerships do the heavy lifting on price.
A student in Ouarzazate has no negotiating position with a software vendor. A membership base does. This is the least glamorous part of affordable-by-design and probably the most effective: we negotiate group access and partner rates with other companies and brands, so members reach tools at prices that are simply not available to them individually. The buying power comes from the community, and it goes back to the community.
What affordable by design is not.
It is not a free tier paid for by advertising, because that is the model we rejected on principle. It is not a loss-leading launch price that gets quietly raised once enough people are locked in. And it is not a discount you have to email support to request. The price is published, the tiers are visible, and the cheapest useful option is a real option.
References
Upsilon Consulting - SMIG and SMAG Morocco: Official Minimum Wage Rates
MyWorkPay - 2025 Changes to Income Tax and Minimum Wage in Morocco
Paritydeals - Why purchasing power parity pricing is a must for digital products