Signing up in Udemy matters. From where you sign up matters too…

Sampath Kumar
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

I am a software developer working in a corporate company in India. I had always been following Udemy for the diversity of courses it provides.

Recently I had come across something called Curiosity Sale in Udemy where numerous courses are offered at 90 to 95% off until August 31, 2017. I got an ad for a course related to drawing and seeing that it had very good reviews, I wanted to buy that course.

When I got into the page of that course, I got to see this.

Good. A 4.5 rated course, lifelong availability of the course materials just for INR 450.That sounds amazing. I am definitely gonna pocket it.

Oh wait.. You must have seen it. I have not logged in yet.

As I had already signed up to Udemy for another course long back, I logged in and went to the same course page to find this:

What ? USD 10 ? What did I just do ? I just logged in, didn't I ?

How can it be ? I am at my home network. So even if the currency in Udemy automatically changes based on the IP address of the user, I am safe to say that my ISP is in India. And hence it should show the price in INR and not in USD !!!

I checked redoing the same a couple of times, tried everything in in-cognito and every time, the same thing happened.

As expected, on seeing $ 10, my mind started calculating and my fingers started typing $10 to INR in Google search. And I ended up in a figure of INR 640.45. This is Rs.190.45 more than what Udemy showed me initially, when I had not signed in.

Calm down... Udemy is good. It must have a way to change my currency. After 5 minutes of search through all options in Udemy website, I could not find a place where I can change my currency. Even Google could not find a way for doing that.

Only Premium Instructors have the ability to do something with the currency. That too, for the courses they sell/instruct. But I am neither an instructor, nor a premium member (if some one can be).

I started searching through the currency support and policies in Udemy. And finally found this.

Yes.. You read it right.

The currency is set based on the IP location of where your Udemy account was created

Now I realize my mistake. I must have signed up for Udemy the first time, from my Office Network which is US based. And Udemy has taken up that cue and set my currency as USD.

Because of this, I have to pay INR 190.45 more.

It is true that the offer for the course is 93% irrespective of the currency. The actual value of the course is $ 150 and Rs.6100, which don’t match up ($150 = Rs.9606, which is way more than 6100).

Still, the bottom line is that had I signed up for Udemy using my home network, I could have saved Rs.190.45.

And the worst case is when we do not have any offer for the course and we end up paying $150 (Rs.9606) instead of Rs.6100 which is utterly disastrous.

Hence, beware from where you are signing up to such online forums in future.

Update:

As Amsakanna C rightly pointed out, now we can use the Udemy app in our home network to buy courses in INR, irrespective of the network from which you signed up in Udemy.

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