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.
gramps
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