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The commercial plan was spread over five documents written in five different weeks, and they contradicted each other: product.md sold the Store, decisions.md called the Store dead then re-opened, Distribution.md (736 lines) still described Polar as a download host, MARCOM.md quoted "no subscription" next to a paid tier, and README.md promised "free forever". An outsider could not tell what ships. docs/ai/commercial.md is now the only place money is decided: free = whole app at a 921,600 px / 30 fps output profile covering the recording as well as the stream; Pro = $10/mo or $400 lifetime through Polar, key bound to the buyer's YouTube channel ID via a claim page, 2 activations, 7–14 day lease with offline grace, fail closed, never downgrade a running stream; one portable zip + winget primary, Steam and the Store parked; Azure Trusted Signing (~$9.99/mo), no EV; Founding 200 promo; ~$135/yr costs; anti-piracy posture and what is permanently rejected. Everything else now points at it instead of restating it: - product.md — money sections replaced with pointers; packaging rewritten to winget-first, Store parked; signing updated to Trusted Signing. - decisions.md — graveyard with cause of death for free-forever, the Store ordering, the updater, and the 2026-10-30 reversal of the quality-ceiling rejection. - Distribution.md — rewritten to release mechanics only (artifact, GitHub Releases, winget manifest, signing, checklist, takedown): 736 → 120 lines. - TASKS.md — TASK 54 rewritten, TASK 48's route settled, TASK 10 superseded, five new rows (entitlement seam, output-profile gate, licence UI, system messages, packaging). - README.md — "free forever" replaced with the real split. - capture.md — obs-backgroundremoval is GPL-3.0 and so licence-INCOMPATIBLE since the proprietary EULA; the old "compatible" line was falsified by that change. - TASKS/task-10, task-48, task-51, task-54 — superseded-banner at the top of each, so none of them reads as current policy. - HANDOFF.md — rewritten: plan settled, next code unit is the entitlement seam. MARCOM.md and MONETIZATION.md (gitignored) were corrected in place: policy pointer at the top of each, the flash removed from every live claim, the Polar fee break-even corrected to ~$900/mo, and the projections flagged as written against a dead model.
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TASK 10 — Monetization: watermark-only paid delta (branding flash)
⛔ RETIRED — 2026-10-30. Both halves of this file are dead: the watermark/branding-flash delta (retired 2026-10-30) and Store IAP as the billing provider (Store is parked, third channel, 2026-10-31). The paid delta is output quality now, sold through Polar. Live policy:
docs/ai/commercial.md; cause of death:docs/ai/decisions.md. Nothing here is a build instruction.
Catalog:
TASKS.md— status and requirements live here.
Goal: a paid tier that removes the branding flash and nothing else. Every feature is free — Alerts, social bar slots, voice filters, TRAX, recording, analytics. The free tier is the full app. ⛔ There is no feature gating, ever — revenue argument, not taste: the free tier's reach is the funnel, and the flash is an ad running inside other people's content, so a free user with a flash every 30–60s is already paying in exposure.
⚠️ STATUS: THIS IS A TEARDOWN, NOT A BUILD (2026-09-27). The billing provider is
Microsoft Store IAP, not Polar. Everything below describing Polar is dead and is retained
only as history. Do not resurrect any of it. The teardown's file-by-file list lives in
TASKS/task-48-distribution-msix.md item 0 — work from there,
not from this file.
Pricing — ✅ DECIDED 2026-09-27: $10/mo subscription, or $400 lifetime. No annual.
| Tier | Price | Net after 15% | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | Everything, plus the branding flash. The funnel. |
| Pro monthly | $10/mo | ~$8.50/mo | The default. Low-risk entry. |
| Pro lifetime | $400 | ~$340 | The hedge. Committed / subscription-hostile buyers. |
- 15% Store revenue share, subscriptions included — verified from the ADA v8.10 PDF, §6(b)(i). Net receipts are after VAT/GST, so commission is not paid on pass-through tax.
- Break-even is month 40, so the two tiers barely compete — which is why lifetime is safe to offer at launch rather than saving it for later.
- ⛔ No annual tier — Microsoft does not pro-rate and the developer cannot refund the
forfeited remainder. ⛔ No
.99prices. ⛔ No discounted upgrade SKU. - ADA §6(h): raising the price disables auto-renew ⇒
$10is effectively locked for life. - ⛔ Superseded pricing, do not cite: the 2026-09-21 one-time model (
$29founder →$49list lifetime) and the earlier$49.99/yr → $99/yrsubscription.
Related work — monetization awareness (2026-09-01, ungated, free): this task's billing is the
payer side; the product also carries built-in, ungated monetization awareness for every creator —
reward-event capture (all 7 liveChatMessage reward event types → canonical RewardEvent → SQLite
persistence), per-session/broadcast reports (members, Super Chat $, stickers, gifts, milestones — the
in-app replacement for the emailed "stream activity report"), and a journey tracker (position % +
ETA vs. versioned, date-aware YPP thresholds; the Tier-2 bar doubles for new applicants 2027-02-01).
Details and design notes: ai.md → Monetization. This is tracked as related work under this task's
narrative, not a separate task number — it ships in its own code slices with one integration test each.
Scope: v1 (2026-09-01 complete-v1 ruling — there is no v1.x): slice order = reward-event capture →
session report → journey tracker → Alerts (TASK 3 item 20).
Business details (pricing, Partner Center product declaration) in MONETIZATION.md (gitignored).
Status: 🔶 TEARDOWN — steps 1–7 shipped under Polar, all now to be removed
Steps 1–7 below are a record of what was built, not a description of what ships. The Polar licensing path is being deleted because Store IAP supplies the same bit from the OS entitlement.
- ⛔ Billing provider — was Polar (polar.sh). DELETED. The product, checkout link, and the
discount codes
LLAMAFOUNDER/LLAMA50no longer exist. Store IAP products are declared in Partner Center, not Polar. - ⛔ License key entry + verification UI — was the About-overlay swap panel ("Enter License Key"). DELETING.
- ⛔ Offline entitlement — was
LayoutStoreSettings (LicenseKey,LicenseValidatedAt,IsPremium) + a 14-day offline grace period + startup re-validation. DELETING. The OS supplies license state, so the entire offline-grace machine goes with it — along with the whole "network flaky → app thinks I'm expired" bug class. - ✅ BrandFlash → watermark toggle —
IsPremiumsetter flipsBrandFlashEnabled = !value, so the flash stops the moment the entitlement flips. This survives the teardown. Under Store IAPIsPremiumis derived from the Store entitlement rather than a remote HTTP call. One bit, locally cached, refreshed by the OS. ⚠️ This is the whole product surface of the paid tier. - ✅ Remove social slot locks — all 6 social bar slots open to everyone. Survives.
- ⛔ "Unlock Premium" button —
PremiumUrlpointed at Polar checkout. DELETING; the Store handles purchase. Paid users see zero license UI. - ⛔ Licensing model / renewal-lapse path — already dead before the Store ruling (a perpetual key never expires). Now superseded again: Store IAP has no keys at all.
- ✅ Velopack auto-updates — NuGet package + bootstrap in
App.xaml.cs. DELETED 2026-10-22 (TASK 48 slice 3) — a compliance action, not cleanup: the updater downloaded and executed, and Store policy 10.2.2 does not permit it. The Store updates the app instead. Guard:ytLive.Tests/StorePackagingTests.cs.