The following term descriptions allow us to be as up-front and transparent with you as much as we possibly can before you dive into buying your own iPhone Application. Reading these will give you further explanation of how we charge and what we charge for.
Sound Around defines a "month" as being 30 continuous days. Our billing system is set up for this because it allows us to do consistent proration and have predictable income.
A Unique User is defined as a device that uses your application that month. This device, whatever it is (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, etc), can access your app as many times as possible in a one month period and it will only count as a single Unique User. On the flip side, if one of your fans accesses your app with their iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad, that will count as 3 Unique Users.
Our plans allow for a maximum amount of unique users in your 30 day billing window. After this you will be billed 1 cent ($0.01) for each additional Unique User over the allotted amount.
For example, Garage Band allows you to have 1,000 Unique Users. If you see 1,500 Unique Users during a single month (500 overage), you'll be billed an extra $5.00 for your Unique User overage (1 cent * 500).
We will send you warnings when you've reached 85% and 95% of your allowed monthly Unique Users. If you blow it out of the water one month, we'll be able to work with you to adjust your plan in time before your overage will cost you your next child.
Right now you're free to upgrade and downgrade one time each billing period and our system will handle it as necessary. You'll be prorated for the portion of the month that you didn't use and charged for a prorated overage (if necessary).
Our pricing tiers are set up based on the usage that your application sees. It costs Sound Around more money only if your app gets used, so thats all that we charge for. Our competitors have traditionally charged on a download basis. We feel that this is completely unfair to you as a customer. Let's take a look at why charging based on downloads frankly sucks.
As a band, you are going to be active some months, less active other months, super active as you tour, and not active at all if you're on break. If we charged by download, your monthly bill will ONLY go up and you'll pay for each app download for the lifetime of your app - whether or not the person that downloaded it ever uses it again.
Please reread the previous sentence.
People are doing more and more on their mobile phones - music discovery included - and it's not fair to charge you for somebody who downloads your app and never uses it again.
The solution? Charge based on usage, not based on downloads. If you're touring and attracting a lot of attention, kick your plan up to handle the increased usage. Going on break before your summer tour? Take your plan down to the one that'll let you pay the least. It's no sweat off of our back and it should save you some extra cashmoney before you hit the road.
Some changes require that Sound Around rebuild and resubmit your application to Apple or require us to do some administrative work with your application on Apple's servers. These items include the following:
To cover our time and effort to make these updates, we charge $15 each time your application needs attention from Sound Around. The charge is the same regardless of how many of the above items change.