735132 - Tier 0 and effect on premium / free

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Developer Pages, defect, P1)

Description

[Andy McKay]

This is a request for design decision on free and premium apps.

We had a few concerns about users flipping between free and premium apps in bug bug 688037, comment 2 specifically.

Diane was wanting developers to be able to flip between free and premium, I think because that free with in-app is a better model. Email subject "dev can change app from free to paid to free".

I heard rumours that the Apps team wants to allow people to flip between free and premium, primarily because there's nothing we can do to stop a developer doing that.

In the developer registration I just let developers flip around between free and premium because I wasn't sure what the plan was and it had no effect yet.

Finally I noticed that your price tiers document has a tier of 0. Indicating you could have a premium app with no cost. That was a solution we'd talked about at some point for some of these issues.

Could I get a decision on the plan for the next milestone please? Are we:

- allowing developers to switch between free and premium,

- not allowing developers to switch, but instead having a premium of tier 0.

- etc

And any special consequences of that. I'll file bugs on what needs to change based on all that.

Comment 1

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

Here's what the developer spec says:

---
Switching between Free and Paid
Apps can enroll in the Marketplace, change price tiers, or change monetization models at any time.

There are two ways for a paid app to switch to free: it can select the free price tier or it can remove its payment settings. 
---

I think that still holds up and we should have a free price tier.

Comment 2

[Diane Loviglio [:diane]]

My user research showed that once a dev made an app a paid app, he could not then make it a free app.  So I just want to make sure that the solution allows the dev to change their mind at any time from paid to free or free to paid or paid to free to paid.

Comment 3

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Why are we differentiating free vs paid for $0?

Comment 4

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

(In reply to Wil Clouser [:clouserw] from comment #3)
> Why are we differentiating free vs paid for $0?

We need a free price tier because we'll have temporary price changes (sales) in the future and developers will want to make their apps free without removing their payment settings.

The difference between a Free App and a Paid App at $0 is whether their payment settings are still kept. As we'll want to re-review any apps that were originally free and switch to paid, it also ensures we don't have to do that for these price tier adjustments.

Comment 5

[Andy McKay]

All settings are retained in a switch between free and paid.

Will add in free tier.

Comment 6

[Andy McKay]

https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/commit/6a2087

Comment 7

[Victor Carciu]

Attachment: Postfix Screenshot