Developers on the Windows platform were not allowed to set the price on their own apps by Microsoft?
Well, not exactly! All along, Microsoft has to a greater extent allowed developers to set their own prices for the various apps they create for the Windows platform. However, Microsoft was keen not to have prices such as $20.34 for an app in the Microsoft Store. Microsoft somewhat controlled pricing to ensure prices be set along the line of $19.99.
Call it petty, but that how Microsoft used to roll, and any developers who wanted to roll with them, had to be down with their rules and regulations. However petty some of them appeared.
Well, going forward, Microsoft has decided it is the developers’ business on how much they want to price their app. Should they want to price them at $88.88, $90.05, $5.67 or whichever, Microsoft will no longer care to instruct developers on how to price their applications.
This move, dubbed Free-form pricing, will see Microsoft give developers a little bit more space to do as they will. The developer(s) can use this new feature in the Windows Dev Center as follows:
Select the market where you want to override the base price with a free-form price:
Click on the select market for the base price override, then select the specific market, and finally click on Create.
Overriding the base price
Select Free-form price from the drop-down menu and then enter you value
The entered free-form price must be within the valid range (e.g. for USD the range is between $0.99 – $1,999.99). You must also use the correct format for the currency you chose to use.
In case of any errors, you will be alerted via validation warnings. To learn more about the Free-form pricing model by Microsoft, click here.
