Monetizing Your App: The Lowdown

Abstract

When all is said and done, most developers aren’t in it just for the sake of creative expression. In most cases, you want some financial gain from the work you’ve done—even if it’s only enough to cover the expenses of building an application. And to be sure, building and maintaining modern apps can get very expensive very quickly. For one thing, because of the sandboxed nature of Windows 8 apps, many features—specifically of those applications built to target the legacy desktop—aren’t available in the Windows 8 app world. Windows 8 apps are of course sandboxed for a reason—to minimize the damage a misbehaving application can do to a device—but the side effect of these well-deserved limitations is a need for apps to generally include a cloud component. This cloud-resident part of the application functions like a traditional application with full access to the cloud server’s environment. Hosting such a solution quickly turns your fixed-cost app (the sweat equity used to build the application has a onetime price tied to it) into a recurring-cost app.