Mar 11, 2014

There are different ways to monetise your Windows Store apps. The simplest way is to require your customers to pay for your app before they download it. The price range is from US$1.49 to US$999.99 with increments starting at 50 cents and increasing as the price gets higher. To increase the chances of selling your app, it is advisable to provide a free trial period. You can choose from  1, 7, 15 or 30 days of free trial. You can also specify that there is no time limit so the customer could keep using the trial version forever. As a developer, you can use the CurrentApp.LincenseInformation.IsTrial API to check if the app is running as a trial and decide which features will be available. This makes the unlimited trial an interesting option for consideration. You would need to provide enough features to make the unlimited trial appealing but save some killer features to justify moving to a paid version. Your app won’t launch if the trial has expired. Instead, a dialog box will be displayed giving the user the option to purchase it. This is a built-in behaviour - you don’t have to write any code for that. A good strategy is to provide a simple way in the app UI to allow the user to buy it any time before it expires. You could have a button “Buy It” or maybe prompt the user regularly reminding them that the app will expires in a certain amount of days. The API LicenseInformation.ExpirationDate will be helpful in this scenario. To programmatically trigger the purchase process, you can call the method CurrentApp.RequestAppPurchase() where a Windows Store dialog box will appear and the user can complete the purchase. The strategy of providing trials, even the time unlimited ones, and then enticing the user to purchase the paid version can be complemented with a more sophisticated business model known as In-App Purchases. In a nutshell, instead of trials, In-App Purchases involves providing your app for free but selling specific features and services directly from the app. There are 2 types of In-app purchases: durable purchases and consumable purchases. Downloadable content is a suitable candidate for In-app purchase. Users can download videos that can be watched in the next 7 days only (a consumable purchase) or a book that is available forever (a durable purchase). In the case of a book, for example, it could be a new edition that's published and your user could get that at a discounted price given they have already purchased the previous edition. So, the In-App purchases business model is very flexible and can potentially generate a stream of revenue from a single user. The API to support In-App purchases is more complex than the ones we illustrated with the trials. For an in depth coverage, I recommend the course New Horizons' training program 20485: Advanced Windows® Store App Development Using C#.