docs: no annual tier — Microsoft does not pro-rate, and that is unfixable from our side

The creator raised it as instinct: "who hasn't been screwed over cancelling a
sub early to be told that the extra six months remaining are your loss?" Checking
the mechanism confirms it, and worse than expected.

Microsoft's general position: "Digital goods like apps, add-on content,
subscriptions... aren't refundable unless the offer or applicable law states that
you're eligible for a refund." Pro-rated refunds on cancel exist only in Canada,
Denmark, France, Israel, Korea, Turkey (all lengths) and Finland, Germany,
Netherlands, Poland, Portugal (renewals only). Critically: "monthly subscriptions
and initial (pre-renewal) purchases aren't eligible for a prorated refund."

A first-year annual subscriber who cancels in month 2 loses months 3-12, in most
countries, and the developer cannot refund it. That is verbatim the trap the
creator named, so we must not build it. => monthly only. Max loss $10, max
grievance a rounding error, one fewer product to declare, less support surface.

The chargeback argument gets stronger, not weaker: a customer down $89 on an
annual cliff disputes through their bank, which is frozen funds and account risk
against a solo dev. Monthly bounds that at $10.

Also records two rulings:
- No .99 prices. "Let's stop with the x.99 stuff - I find that irritating. Just say:
  ten bucks a month." The convention only makes a price look cheaper, which is
  incoherent for a brand sold on honesty and no-dark-patterns.
- No feature gating, now argued as revenue rather than taste: the free tier's reach
  is the funnel and the branding flash is an ad running inside other people's
  content.

Pricing model itself stays OPEN in TASKS.md — $10/mo is the lean, and a lifetime
product (~$300, the hedge against the no-moat renewal problem) is undecided. The
Store revenue share is still unverified: confirm the net, not the list.

MyMistakes.md records the actual error: I had offered "just refund anyone who
asks" as a mitigation without checking who holds the authority to execute it.
Store refunds run through Microsoft, not the developer. The check that followed
is what produced this constraint.

MONETIZATION.md got the full analysis but is gitignored, so it stayed local.

MyMistakes.md

@@ -1131,3 +1131,36 @@ the same class as the dead-Pin incident in `FfmpegLocator` (`ai.md` → FFmpeg l
 external thing changed, our record of it did not, and the mismatch was discovered by a user
 rather than by a test. **Records of the outside world rot silently and are believed until they
 cost money.**
+
+---
+
+## 2026-09-27 — I offered a mitigation I had not checked the mechanics of: "just refund anyone who asks"
+
+While discussing a subscription price, I wrote that at `$99/yr` with zero marginal cost the
+creator could **"just refund anyone who asks"** — presented as a free mitigation against the
+churn/refund burden of a subscription. **That lever does not exist for Microsoft Store IAP.**
+Refunds run through Microsoft, not the developer; the buyer requests them from the Store, and
+the developer cannot unilaterally issue one. I proposed it before ever checking how Store
+refund mechanics work, and it sounded confident because it was arithmetically true and
+operationally impossible.
+
+**The rule:** *a mitigation is not an answer until you know who has the authority to execute
+it.* Before offering "we can just do X," ask **who presses the button** — and if the answer is
+"Microsoft, or the user's bank, or a regulator," then it is not our mitigation and must not be
+counted as one. The same sentence reappears in a subtler failure: the underlying instinct
+(refunds *should* be cheap when marginal cost is zero) was sound; the *agency* was invented.
+
+**The verification that came out of it is the real prize.** Checking Store refund policy
+produced a hard constraint that **reshaped the pricing design** and would otherwise have
+produced a product we could not fix: pro-rated refunds on cancellation are limited to a narrow
+country list, and **"monthly subscriptions and initial (pre-renewal) purchases aren't eligible
+for a prorated refund."** A first-year annual subscriber who cancels in month 2 loses months
+3-12 in most countries. That is precisely the trap the creator had already named as
+irritating — and it is unfixable from the developer side. **Hence: monthly, no annual tier.**
+
+**Generalisation, and it is the same shape as the policy-applicability lesson above:** the
+expensive mistakes are never the ones where I knew nothing. They are the ones where a *plausible,
+well-formed, unverified* claim got to speak without a check — a dead EV-certificate benefit, a
+policy number with no scope, a refund lever I did not control. **Sound reasoning about a
+mechanism I had not verified is the failure mode, not the safety net.** Before any external
+mechanism drives a decision, name the one fact that would falsify it, then go get that fact.