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.
Creator ruling 2026-09-27. Criteria, verbatim: "zero headaches, minimal
maintenance (for me) while still providing accountability and a reasonably
easy upgrade flow." Route A is the only combination where all four are solved
by handing the work to Microsoft rather than to a certificate vendor: $0/yr,
no certificate, no HSM, no annual renewal, no SmartScreen ramp — plus Store
auto-update, Store-side payments/entitlements/refunds/support, and Microsoft
review as the accountability layer.
The rejected options and their reasons stay in research-store-certification.md
§3 so a later session reads the ruling instead of re-deriving it.
What this deletes:
- The entire licensing backend. PolarLicenseService, PolarLicense,
MainViewModel.License.cs (PremiumUrl, customer portal, the OfflineGracePeriod
= 14 days subscription-era artifact, renewal/lapse copy) and the wrong
"Polar unlocks alerts" string all become dead code. IsPremium is derived from
the Store entitlement instead of an HTTP call, which also removes the whole
"network flaky -> app thinks I'm expired" bug class.
- Velopack, the update URL, and the self-hosted droplet — the Store updates.
- Distribution.md's premise: Polar as the distribution backbone, Polar file
hosting, and code signing as our problem. The IP-protection sections (1, 5,
6, 7) still stand and the build-posture ceiling is unchanged.
What does NOT change: the entitlement. Free gets everything; the branding
flash stays the only paid delta. Store IAP changes how IsPremium is obtained,
never what it gates.
Still open, deliberately: the price. The Store revenue share is unverified (do
not assume a percentage), and MONETIZATION.md's $29 -> $49 one-time decision is
re-opened against a fresh instinct toward ~$99/yr. No price encoded yet.
The first code unit is unchanged: bundle ffmpeg (TASK 48 item 1). That clears
the one hard certification gate and fixes a real user-facing 404.
MARCOM.md and MONETIZATION.md were edited too but are gitignored by design, so
those changes stayed local.
The distribution answer existed only in conversation, so every session re-derived
it. It is now in the map, and the route decision is explicitly parked as the
creator's.
new TASKS/research-store-certification.md — Store Policies 7.20 + MSIX packaging:
which policies bind, which don't (and why), cert economics, camera/mic gating
layers, YouTube age + COPPA, the 11.12 UGC judgment call.
Two real defects surfaced, neither fixed (docs-only unit):
- FfmpegLocator downloads an unsigned exe from GitHub and runs it. That is
policy 10.2.2 (dynamic code inclusion) verbatim, and it is the root cause of
the 2026-09-01 404 — the pin aged out of BtbN's 14-day retention on the
creator's first real recording attempt. -> TASK 48 item 1, not
Store-conditional.
- Distribution.md:318 recommended a $400+/yr EV cert for a SmartScreen bypass
Microsoft removed in March 2024. Fixed; had it shipped it would have cost
$400+/yr to buy what $150 buys.
Also new: TASKS/task-48 (checklist, carved out of TASK 36 item 6) and
TASKS/task-49 (chat profanity filter, not blocked). ai.md gains the durable
invariants — full trust or recording breaks silently, chat is rendered never
stored — plus a correction to the FFmpeg locator section. MyMistakes.md records
the lesson: a policy citation is a claim about scope, not just text.
MARCOM.md got the privacy-copy guard but is gitignored by design, so that edit
stays local and did not travel here.
gramps