Contingent Pricing for App Store Subscriptions
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Contingent pricing for subscriptions on the App Store — a new feature that helps you attract and retain subscribers — lets you give customers a discounted subscription price as long as they’re actively subscribed to a different subscription. It can be used for subscriptions from one developer or two different developers. We’re currently piloting this feature and will be onboarding more developers in the coming months.
Everything seems to be about subscriptions these days.
Pete Hare, an Apple engineering manager, said in a LinkedIn post that the company will “handle all the eligibility checks and commerce work” and that customers can download and subscribe to apps being promoted “in one step directly from email links or the App Store.” It could be a while before the benefits of the program are visible out in the wild, as Apple says it is bringing developers on board over the “coming months.”
It’s not clear to me why this is the sort of feature that needs to be pre-announced and piloted to a select group first.
This is interesting. Wasn’t expecting it to allow the contingency to be from another developer. This will allow various partnerships between indie devs.
The other potential use with two different developers is as a sort of “competitive upgrade” incentive to get customers to switch to your product. I did not see anything in Apple’s (very sparse) documentation about whether this is intended or possible, e.g. whether both developers have to agree to the discount and whether it’s reciprocal. The discount does require active subscriptions to both products, but it seems that condition would be met if you were switching to a new product just before the first one expired.
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Apple is so creative when it comes to subscription pricing. I really don't understand why they won't support the easiest paradigm of paid upgrades between major versions with optional discounts. The only reason I can think of is that they want to reeducate cuomsters to get used to subscription pricing.
