App stores are great in helping developers skip all the hassles of setting up payment and licensing systems. The downside is that you don’t own the relationship with your customers — app store does. When you release a new app you sort of have to sell it to your existing customers almost from scratch. And this sucks.

It would be great to be able to do something like what Adobe does with its Creative Cloud — sell the whole bundle of your products to customers once for a price that is higher than any single one of your products (making it worthwhile to you), but lower than a few of the products combined (making it attractive to many of your customers).

That’s why I got curious and excited when I noticed on AppRaisin (disclaimer: I run AdDuplex, which runs AppRaisin) that my friends at Finebits released Finebits AppPack:

Finebits AppPack

The app lists all of their Windows 10 apps and lets you download paid versions for free. All through the Microsoft Store.

When you click on, say, Metro Commander Pro you see this in the Microsoft (formerly Windows) Store:

While someone who doesn’t own AppPack see this:

The AppPack itself costs $37.49, but at the time of this writing it’s free for a few more days, so you may want to hurry up and grab it. Check out their Sway about the AppPack here.

So, how did they do this?

You can do something similar to Adobe CC with your own set of apps without rolling out your own infrastructure, by utilizing conditional sales in the Microsoft Store.

One caveat for now, is that subscription add-ons are only available to developers participating in an early adoption program and I’m not sure if it would be possible to set it up without a single line of code as in this one-time payment example.

So, Imagine you have your “Base App” (your equivalent of Creative Cloud app or Finebits AppPack). What you need to do is login to your Dev Center account and go to each of your “real” apps, create a new submission, go to “Pricing and availability”, “Sale pricing” and create a new sale. Then you just select all the markets you care about and change “Offered to” from “Everyone” to “Owners of” your “Base App.” That’s it.