To put it in perspective, the average website costs $0.12 in Canada.
Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices.
More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater.
Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.
Poorer countries (let's say those in the middle) quite often have newer network infrastructure, so prices are actually much better, even relative to income.
In Poland it's around 0.25$ per GB for mobile networks. So 1MB is 0.00025$ and a visit to reddit according to the above calculations would be 0.0003475$.
The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
> The prices in the US and Canada are ridiculous from that perspective.
The prices in the US aren't actually a serious problem any longer (they were if you go back 10 years, before T-Mobile's climb changed the market). Americans can trivially afford it given their disposable incomes at the median are among the highest on the planet. US plan prices have declined over the past ten years in nominal terms, while inflation has eroded another 30% of the price. $50-$60 is a nearly meaningless part of the average person's monthly budget in the US now (the median full-time income is $50,000, and Americans have low taxes at the median, which is where the high disposable incomes come from). Nobody is better at wasting money than Americans, they're thrilled to do it, you can tell judging by how they so willingly vaporize their disposable income on consumer garbage. And US plans typically have plenty of data with them these days, whereas Canada gets the worst of both outcomes (terrible data packages and very high prices).
People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56). Now you've got a T-Mobile plan in the US at that price, so what. Or someone will say I'm in Britain and I pay £25; yeah that's not cheap either, that's about $50x when you adjust it to the US for USD and incomes.
>The prices in the US aren't actually a serious problem any longer
I pay $23 including taxes and fees for two unlimited Sprint lines.
Admittedly, one is the $15 Kickstart plan available for two weeks in June 2018, and the other is a free line that Sprint last year gave out to almost everyone with at least one paid line.
But if I didn't have such plans, I'd pay $25 (after joining a discount group, which is trivial) for unlimited prepaid service from Visible. Or $30 for unlimited from Mint. Etc., etc.
>People come on HN and say things like: well I'm in Latvia and I pay €12 and get unlimited data. Well yeah, adjust that to the US and it's €48 (~$56).
Correct. Further, that US plan provides service everywhere in the country, from San Diego to Portland (either one), from Seattle to Miami, from Honolulu to Anchorage to Charlotte. Yes, there are European mobile plans that also offer all-inclusive coverage across the continent, but the super-cheap plans that are cited in these sorts of discussions usually aren't among them.
Both an indictment of general bloat and Canada data prices.
More interesting is how much it costs for people in poorer countries — Where the absolute value of visiting a site is less, but relative to income is far greater.
Understandably you don't see much about this online — people with expensive data plans don't use it all up complaining about it online.