ChatGPT costs EGP 980/month in Egypt. Here's the EGP 98 alternative.

Dev.to / 5/13/2026

💬 OpinionSignals & Early TrendsTools & Practical UsageIndustry & Market Moves

Read original →

共有:

Key Points

The article argues that ChatGPT Plus costs Egyptian developers about EGP 980/month, which can amount to roughly 6–12% of an average monthly software salary, making it feel disproportionately expensive versus higher-income markets.
It claims that global SaaS pricing is effectively set for USD-earning users and local purchasing power in the U.S., so the same pricing doesn’t translate fairly when paid from Egypt.
The author says they built SimplyLouie, a Claude-powered browser-based AI assistant priced at EGP 98/month, positioned as about 10x cheaper than the ChatGPT Plus equivalent.
SimplyLouie is described as offering unlimited conversations, code review/debugging, writing and summarization tools, and a developer API that uses the user’s own key.
The lower price is attributed to lean infrastructure (no VC/growth/enterprise sales) and a stated allocation of 50% of subscriptions to animal rescue, with pricing intended to be affordable for people who need it.

If you're a developer in Egypt, here's the math that will frustrate you.

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month. At current exchange rates, that's around EGP 980/month.

The average software developer salary in Egypt is roughly EGP 8,000–15,000/month depending on experience and sector.

That means ChatGPT costs you 6–12% of your monthly salary. Every month.

For an American developer earning $8,000/month, that same $20 is 0.25% of salary. They barely notice it. You definitely do.

The pricing wasn't built for you

OpenAI prices for San Francisco. The same model, the same API, the same output — but the price assumes you earn in USD and live where a coffee costs $7.

You don't.

This isn't a complaint. It's a structural reality of how global SaaS pricing works. Build for the rich market, export the price globally.

What I built instead

I'm Louie. I built SimplyLouie — a Claude-powered AI assistant that costs EGP 98/month instead of EGP 980+.

That's 10x cheaper. Not a discount. Not a promo. That's the actual price.

It's built on Claude (Anthropic's model), runs in your browser, no setup required, and includes:

Unlimited conversations
Code review and debugging
Writing, editing, summarizing
A developer API with your own key

# Example: use it from the terminal
curl -X POST https://simplylouie.com/api/chat \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"message": "Review this Python function for edge cases"}'

Why so cheap?

Two reasons:

I run lean infrastructure. No VC funding, no growth team, no enterprise sales. Just a server and a mission.
50% of every subscription goes to animal rescue. The pricing has to work for people who need it — not just people who can afford to not care.

The comparison

Tool	Egypt price	% of avg dev salary
ChatGPT Plus	EGP 980/month	6–12%
SimplyLouie	EGP 98/month	0.6–1.2%
Local model (M4 Mac)	EGP 40,000+ upfront	—

Local AI "needs to be the norm" — but not everyone can drop EGP 40,000 on hardware to run a model locally. A cloud option at local-market pricing is the practical alternative.