What’s up with scribd and it’s changing prices?

[tempest@de]

Since my library membership expired and they no longer accept readers from abroad I decided to subscribe to scribd because they have several audiobooks that I'm interested, I was surprised because I saw 4 different prices for the subscription.


The first one was 13,99 €, I though it weird because I didn’t remember having read anything about an increase in price so I checked and found that in the US the price is still 9,99 $US. I tried accessing trough scribd.com but it always changed to pt.scribd.com, so I used another browser, one where I had never opened scribd with and again same price, 13,99 €, tried another browser and this time it came at 11,99 € .






I went back to my usual browser and cleaned the history, cache and cookies and typed scribd.com, this time it opened and showed 9,99 €, ok this seems more like it, so I logged in since I already have an account and went to activate the subscription but the price was now 10,99 €.





I assumed the site checked my location, so I changed to my phone where I have VPN installed and set the country to the US, then I opened the app, logged in and the price shown was 10,99 €, I went to check the preferences, there is none for location but I changed my preferred language to English, closed the app and opened it again, it briefly shows the price at 9,99 $US but it quickly changes to 10,99 € again.


I had scribd in the past, I paid the 9,99 $US subscription with a Portuguese bank account in euros and never had any issues, even with the bank commission it’s cheaper to pay in US $ than in euros.

Anyone noticed something similar?

[Paperbackstash]

I just double checked and my pricing of $8.99 a month in the US is still the same. Hopefully they're not rising. I can't advise on yours though, sorry.

[ngrant]

A Scribd subscription is your ticket to a world of books. For $9.99 USD (+tax where applicable) per month, you’ll get access to our library of bestsellers, award winners, obscure indie titles, and reader favorites. Even better, we’ll give you personalized recommendations and special collections assembled by our editors to help you find books we think you’ll love. Armed with the Scribd app on your phone, tablet, and web, you’ll never be without a good book to read again.

I am in the USA and have been subscribed since April 2020 (7 months) and seem to be grandfathered into a promo rate of $8.99. This is well worth it for me as I also enjoy the Scribd free perks of Pandora Plus, Curiosity Stream and MUBI. (There are others listed here, but I don't use them). I will be dropping my subscription to the Brooklyn Public Library ($50 per year for out of state members) as I can get all I want to read and listen to on Scribd.

[tempest@de]

I was able to subscribe for the 9,99 $US, I cleaned the browser and set the VPN for the US and typed scribd.com on the browser, it immediately changed to pt.scribd.com but showed the membership price at 9,99 $US, so I went for it, since it’s been a year from the time that I had been a member I was offered the 30 day trial again, which is nice.

I still think all this changes are odd, could scribd detect the language on my browser and open pt.scribd.com because of that?

unfortunately the pt.scrind.com is Brazilian Portuguese, not only on language but also the books shown, it is annoying that every time I open it I have to change the language, it does not remember my preference, in the beginning I asked the support about this and was told that they had plans to allow the user to set the preferred language, shame that after 4 years they still didn’t manage to do it.