Sunday, January 09, 2011

WP7–Application Quotas for Developers

A developer account on WP7 app hub allows you to publish 5 free apps for free, after which you need to pay for every new free app you publish. Here is some additional information regarding the quota.

  1. You can publish unlimited paid apps to the marketplace.
  2. You get to publish 5 free apps to the marketplace, after which you pay $20 per app.
  3. When it comes to updates to your published app:
    1. They are always free and never ever count towards your free quota of applications.
    2. Even an update that fails certification does not count towards your free quota.

To me, the above is an extremely reasonable cost of publishing apps to the market-place because if you think about it, this is what you get for $100 from Microsoft:

  1. An excellent app-store via the Zune.
  2. Management and reporting of downloads of your apps
  3. Free QA team that makes sure that your app performs to a minimum set of requirements (performance, appearance and behavior).
  4. Publicity via Bing’s Visual Search tool.
  5. Free development IDE – that is better than any other IDE out there.

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