Buy a yearly subscription from a seller in another country and you will usually end up looking at three different numbers: the price on the page, the amount you thought you approved, and the line that eventually appears on your statement. They rarely match exactly, and almost nobody explains why.
None of that is sinister. It is the ordinary mechanics of a cross-border charge, plus one moment at checkout where somebody quietly offers to make the decision for you. This piece works through where each number comes from, which of them you control, and what a gap large enough to query actually looks like.
Why three different numbers appear
Start with what a price on a website actually is. It is a figure denominated in one currency — the seller's — which somebody then has to express in yours. That translation can happen in three places, and each produces a slightly different result.
It can happen in advance, if the seller has published a fixed figure for your market. It can happen at the checkout, if the page offers to bill you in your own currency. Or it can happen afterwards, inside your card issuer's systems, when the transaction settles. Only one of those three is likely to reflect a rate close to the wholesale market, and it is not the middle one.
The gap between the numbers is usually small — a percent or two on a yearly plan, which is a few units of currency rather than a scandal. It is worth understanding anyway, because the same mechanism that produces a small unexplained gap is the one that occasionally produces a large one.
Who actually performs the conversion
Three parties can convert a payment, and they charge very differently for it.
| Who converts | Rate they use | What it typically adds | Do you get a choice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nobody — price already set in your currency | None applied | Nothing on the price itself | Decided before you arrive |
| Your card issuer | Scheme rate at settlement | The issuer's own margin, where it charges one | Yes, by declining the checkout offer |
| The checkout page | A rate set by that service | A visible spread, disclosed on screen | Yes, and the default is often to accept |
| A wallet, on its own balance | Its published conversion rate | A spread it sets and can change | Sometimes, by choosing the funding source |
The pattern is consistent. The further the conversion sits from your own bank, the more it tends to cost, and the more clearly it is a product being sold rather than a mechanism running in the background. The exception is the top row, where no conversion happens because the price was denominated in your currency from the start — which is the arrangement described further down.
The checkout box you should refuse
At some point on a foreign checkout you may see a prompt along the lines of: pay in your own currency instead, at a rate shown right there on screen. It reads like a convenience. It is a conversion service, offered at the moment you are least inclined to compare anything.
Two details give it away. The offer is disclosed with a rate attached, because disclosure is required — a conversion happening silently inside your bank does not need one. And the option to accept is frequently the more prominent of the two buttons.
A convenience that has to show you its exchange rate before you agree to it is not a convenience. It is a price, and you are being asked to accept it in one click.
Decline it. The charge then arrives in the seller's currency and your own card converts it, which for most issuers is the cheaper of the two routes. You do give up something real by declining: certainty. Accepting fixes the figure in your currency immediately, while declining means waiting for settlement to see the exact number. On a purchase of this size that certainty is rarely worth what it costs. The wider comparison between raw card entry and wallets is in card versus wallet.
Set local prices versus live conversion
Two sellers can both show you a price in your currency while doing completely different things underneath, and the difference matters over a twelve-month commitment.
A converted price is calculated at the moment you load the page. It tracks the market, which sounds fair and produces a figure that is different every week, ends in awkward decimals, and cannot be quoted back to anyone with confidence. Worse, it means the price you were shown last Tuesday is not the price you are shown today, and neither of you can prove which was which.
A set price is a number the seller has chosen for a market and holds still. It is a real price rather than a calculation. It never matches the day's exchange rate exactly — sometimes slightly above, sometimes slightly below — and in return it is stable, quotable and identical for everyone in that market.
Set prices are the better arrangement for a yearly subscription, for one plain reason: you can write the figure down and hold the seller to it. That is also why the renewal price is checkable in advance rather than being whatever the market decides next July. Ours are listed on the pricing page and broken down market by market on the country page.
Reading the statement line afterwards
A few days after paying, a line appears on your statement. Three things about it routinely confuse people, and all three are normal.
The amount may differ slightly from what you agreed. Settlement happens a day or two after authorisation and the rate used is captured at settlement, not at the moment you pressed the button. A small drift in either direction is the system working as designed.
The name may be unfamiliar. The descriptor often belongs to the payment company that processed the charge rather than to the seller you dealt with. This is worth checking once and remembering, because an unrecognised descriptor is a leading cause of people disputing their own legitimate purchases by mistake — an expensive misunderstanding covered in the chargeback piece.
A separate small line may follow if your issuer charges for foreign use. It is levied by your own bank, appears in your own currency, and has nothing to do with the seller, who never sees it.
When a gap is worth querying: roughly ten percent or more between the agreed price and the converted statement figure, once any foreign-use line is set aside. That size of difference usually means a conversion was applied twice — once at the checkout and once by the issuer — which is exactly what declining the checkout offer prevents.
Why cross-border charges get declined
Currency and country travel together in a risk model, and a yearly subscription is a larger single charge than most online purchases. Put an unfamiliar merchant, a foreign country and a digital service in one transaction and a decline is a fairly ordinary outcome.
It is not a judgement on the seller and it is not a fault in your card. Most declines clear on the second attempt after an in-app approval or a short call. Two habits help: approve the notification your banking app sends rather than dismissing it, and do not retry five times in a row, which some systems read as exactly the pattern they are built to stop.
If a card will not clear at all, the practical options are a different card, a wallet backed by a different card, or a route that has no issuer in it. Each is walked through in the payment methods page. Cryptocurrency sidesteps the decline problem completely and takes every dispute right with it, which is a trade rather than a fix.
What to do before you pay
- Note which currency the price is quoted in. Everything else follows from that one fact, and it is often stated less clearly than the number beside it.
- Ask whether the local price is set or converted. A seller who cannot answer immediately is telling you the figure moves, which matters when you come to renew.
- Screenshot the price before you pay. One image, showing the figure and its currency. It costs nothing and it is the only fixed point if three numbers later disagree.
- Decline the checkout conversion. Let your own card do the work unless the rate offered on screen is genuinely better, which is checkable in the ten seconds before you accept.
- Get the renewal figure in writing. Not the market rate next year — the actual number. On a set-price seller that is a straightforward request, and the answer should match the published page.
How we handle it here
Our base figures are in dollars: $69 for one screen, $97 for two and $137 for three, twelve months, paid once. Every other market has a set price rather than a live conversion — pounds, euros, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars each have their own published figure, chosen in advance and held still.
That means the number you see is the number you can quote back to us in eleven months, and it will not have drifted because a currency pair moved in the meantime. It also means the local figures will never line up exactly with today's exchange rate, and we would rather explain that than publish a price that changes while you are reading it.
Nothing here renews itself and no card is stored, so there is no second conversion happening a year from now on an amount you have stopped watching. When the twelve months end, you decide again, at a price you can check today. The order route and what happens immediately afterwards are described in how to pay for IPTV, and if the arithmetic on your side does not look right, send the numbers to the desk on the contact page and we will work through them with you.
