We’ve continued to help developers monetize their apps on Discord with new Premium Apps features such as subscriptions for servers and users, One-Time Purchases, Store pages, deep-linking for Premium App SKUs, and the Premium Apps Growth Tier, and we expect to deliver even more monetization features for developers soon. With more opportunities to provide users on Discord with easy, accessible options for discovering and upgrading to premium features for their favorite apps, we’re now announcing a change to our Developer Policy that will affect developers that monetize their Discord apps.
What's changing?
Discord is introducing a Monetization Requirements policy that will require developers who offer paid capabilities or other offerings for their apps to support purchase of such items through Discord’s Premium App monetization features at a price no higher than those offered through other payment options.
To give developers of existing apps time to support this change, it will be effective October 7, 2024.
Why the change?
By not requiring users to leave Discord to complete purchases related to their Discord experience, we’re able to offer them a safer, more secure, easier, and trusted transaction experience. This change also helps us continue to invest in the ecosystem of developers and apps that have grown around Discord.
Premium Apps support & price parity
If a developer is selling any paid offering for their app (e.g., access to certain commands, content, or other enhanced app functionality), that app must also make that offering available for purchase to users through Discord’s Premium App features at a final price that is no higher than as offered through other payment options. The final price of the offering is the pre-tax price shown to a user after any price modifications, such as discounts, are applied.
Reminder: The Discord Developer Portal only allows developers to set the price for their Premium Apps SKUs in USD, but those prices are automatically localized for users in different countries at the time of purchase. This helps ensure users in countries all over the world are seeing similarly fair prices for premium content, regardless of where they’re located.
To be clear, this policy will apply to the extent Discord’s Premium App features can support the locale of the developer and the type of offering (or SKU). If an app has multiple offerings, this policy will apply to each supported offering. If we introduce new supported locales or types of offerings, developers will be provided a reasonable period of time to implement relevant Premium Apps features. You can learn more about Premium Apps support here.
Examples
The scenarios below are meant to be representative examples that illustrate how this policy will be applied.
Airhorn Solutions
AHS, Inc. is the developer behind Airhorn Solutions, a popular sound effects tool available as an app on Discord, iOS, and Android. AHS, Inc. is incorporated in the United States, where Discord currently supports developers using Premium Apps features.
Unsupported payment or billing models
AHS, Inc. offers 3 SKUs for its Airhorn Solutions products:
- A “Classic - Monthly” subscription available for $3.99/month per user
- A “Classic - Annual” subscription available for $39.99/year per user
- An “Animals Sound Pack” add-on that’s available as a $4.99 one-time purchase
As of the time of this writing, Premium Apps supports monthly subscriptions and one-time purchases, but does not yet support annual subscriptions. Under this policy, Airhorn Solutions would need to offer the “Classic - Monthly” subscription and “Animals Sound Pack” one-time purchase SKUs through Premium Apps by October 7, 2024.
If Discord releases support for annual subscriptions on January 1, 2025 and gives the developers 120 days to implement, Airhorn Solutions would need to offer the “Classic - Annual” subscription through Premium Apps by May 1, 2025.
Monetization FAQ
Monetization Fees
As a developer, what fees or deductions apply to sales made through Premium Apps features?
There are a few categories of fees and deductions that are important to be aware of, as further described in our Monetization Terms.
- Discord’s Standard Tier includes a Platform Fee of 30%, but we also provide a Growth Tier that lowers the Platform Fee to 15% for the first $1 million USD that a developer team earns on Discord. The Platform Fee is calculated as the relevant percentage times the total payments from a user, less applicable transaction taxes, Payment Processing Fees, and Transaction Fees. We may also deduct refunds, chargebacks, and associated fees from your payout.
- Our Payment Processing Fees and Transaction Fees are provided in the Schedule 1 - Fees section of our Monetization Terms.
- All applicable taxes (including sales, VAT, GST, etc.) are paid directly by the user making the purchase. Discord will remit all sales taxes to the appropriate tax authority.
A representative example of how these fees work: suppose an app generates its first $100 of sales in January. Because this app has just started monetizing, the developers behind it are eligible for the Growth Tier’s Platform Fee of 15%. Assuming a Payment Processing Fee of 6%, sales tax of 8%, and no Transaction Fees:
- Users will pay a total of $108.00, which includes sales tax.
- The developer will receive $79.49, which is calculated as $100.00 of total sales less $6.48 of Payment Processing Fees ($93.52 of net sales), times 15%.
- Note that the Payment Processing Fee in this example is calculated on the total amount paid by the user ($108.00).
Please see our Monetization Terms for the full details of our fee structure for developers monetizing through Premium Apps features.
Why do the Platform Fee, Payment Processing Fee, and Transaction Fee exist? How are each of these fees calculated?
The Platform Fee is a fee to Discord that helps cover the costs that go into building, maintaining, and evolving the native monetization tools we offer for developers and the processes we’ve built to support a highly scalable payment solution. This includes costs associated with product and infrastructure development, customer support, a variety of safety and anti-fraud measures, tax and financial reporting, and more. The Platform Fee also allows us to continue investing in and supporting our developer platform and ecosystem.
Payment Processing Fees are the fees charged by Payment Gateways we use to process purchases of your Offering by users on Discord and make associated payouts to you. We offer users around the world a variety of ways to pay for premium features of an app, and each transaction that we process on your behalf can have a fixed cost, variable cost, or both.
Transaction Fees include currency conversion fees and other fees applied by Payment Gateways, banks, or other entities. This fee can vary in size depending a number of factors and are not set at a fixed rate. Note that Transaction Fees are not always present in a transaction.
Please see our Monetization Terms for the full details of these fees.
Monetization Features and Details
How does automated price localization work?
Please see our Help Center articles on Localized Pricing on Discord and Premium Apps SKU and Store Setup to better understand how automated price localization works.
What does Discord do to limit fraudulent payments that could affect developers?
Discord has spent more than 7 years and a lot of effort to mitigate and limit payment fraud in our own business, and we've baked these protections against payment fraud directly into Premium Apps! In other words, by using Premium Apps features to monetize your app, Discord is automatically helping to protect you and your business from costly and time-consuming payments problems that no one wants to deal with.
Some examples of how we help to protect against these types of issues:
- We proactively block payments based on signals we've learned are indicative of fraud (including signals that aren't available to other payment processors).
- We have internal teams that proactively monitor for fraud, spam, and other types of harmful behaviors.
- We’ve built out a large customer support team that helps address questions and disputes from users when they come up.
- We have automated systems that learn from and adapt to determined adversarial behaviors when it comes to payment fraud and that help us address payment disputes.
And of course, these protections start with factors that are in a developer’s control - from accurately describing and delivering their offerings to providing good user support to resolve issues. Please review our Monetization Terms for more details.
Monetization Requirements
Why are the Monetization Requirements being introduced?
Discord is committed to our developer community, and we want every developer on our platform to continue building, offering innovative and interesting capabilities, and achieving success through whatever it is you decide to build.
We are working hard to bring more features to Premium Apps, and will continue to do so as the needs of our developer community grow and evolve. As additional types of offerings are supported by Premium Apps, you will be given a reasonable period of time to implement support for those features pursuant to the Monetization Requirements described within our Developer Policy. Your compliance with these requirements will be reviewed based on the extent to which your paid app offerings can be implemented through Premium Apps in accordance with our Monetization Terms and Monetization Policy.
We do not take the impact of the Monetization Requirements on you and your app lightly and they are not intended to be a punitive measure. We truly believe that our Premium Apps features will help further the growth and success of apps in a healthy ecosystem by providing users a safer, more convenient, and consistent purchasing experience, a shift that benefits everyone on Discord.
As a reminder, regardless of your use of Premium Apps, your app and its offerings must comply with our Developer Terms of Service and Developer Policy, including requirements for access to specific features (like discovery and privileged intents). We may take action against you or your app if you violate any of our terms or policies or take steps to evade compliance.
If I monetize with multiple tiers off platform, do I need to turn my multiple tiers into a single price point to comply with the Monetization Requirements?
No. The Monetization Requirements section of our Developer Policy is not meant to force developers to alter their existing business models in any way, apart from offering users an option to purchase premium features for their apps directly on Discord. Developers are not required to terminate, migrate, or otherwise alter the terms or structure of any existing paying customers of their app.
Do the Monetization Requirements imply that I need to stop offering a discounted yearly subscription rate?
The Monetization Requirements in our Developer Policy apply to each paid offering that can be implemented through Premium Apps. Since Premium Apps support for subscriptions is currently limited to a monthly cadence, these requirements will not apply to subscriptions that renew on a different schedule until that schedule is supported by Premium Apps. If we introduce a new subscription model supported by Premium Apps, developers that have paid features using that model will be given a reasonable period of time to implement it in order to comply with these requirements.
For example, suppose an app offers both monthly and annual subscriptions. By October 7th, 2024, the developer of this app would be required to support the monthly subscriptions through Premium Apps in order to comply with this policy. Since Premium Apps does not yet support annual subscription terms, the app’s annual subscription offering does not need to be offered directly on Discord at that time.
If Discord launches support for annual subscriptions through Premium Apps at a future date, we will indicate the period of time that all developers will have to implement it for their apps that monetize through annual subscriptions.
** These dates are for illustrative purposes only.*
I offer several different subscription tiers today, but Premium Apps only allows one subscription SKU to be published at any given time. When will I be able to support multiple subscription SKUs in the Store for my app?
We have already kicked off the work to provide support for multiple subscription SKUs! Expect to see support for multiple subscriptions in the coming months. We’ll share details as soon as we’re able to do so. We suggest following #product-news in the Discord Developers server to stay informed of product updates to Premium Apps!
Can I offer discounts on my app’s website to incentivize purchasing there instead of Discord since they will be listed at the same price?
As described above, the Monetization Requirements in our Developer Policy require that the final price of a paid benefit offered on Discord by an app is no higher than the price that’s offered for that benefit through other payment options. The “final price” of the offering is the pre-tax price shown to a user after any price modifications, such as discounts, are applied.
If a discount is technically supportable under the existing feature set of Premium Apps, it is required to be offered through Premium Apps under the Monetization Requirements. For example, if a developer wants to offer a reduced price for a “Treasure Chest” SKU to any user that purchases in the month of April, they could do so by:
- Creating and publishing a new “Treasure Chest - Discounted!” SKU with a discounted price at the beginning of April;
- Offering the SKU for the month of April; and
- Un-publishing the SKU at the end of April.
If a discount format is not yet technically supportable through existing Premium Apps features, it is not required to comply with the Monetization Requirements until it is supportable. For example, say a developer has a “Treasure Hunter - Monthly Subscription” SKU and they want to run a promotion that gives the first subscription month for free to users that subscribe during the month of May. Since Premium Apps doesn’t currently support the concept of time-delimited discounts on subscription SKUs, the Monetization Requirements would not currently apply to this SKU.
Note that “permanent” discounts or discounts offered frequently off-platform may be viewed as effectively offering a lower price for a paid feature off-platform. In such cases, the developer would be considered to be a violation of the Monetization Requirements.
Am I allowed to offer incentives to drive users to purchase paid app features off-platform? Like offering an extra perks if you pay through our website?
No, we would consider this a violation of the Monetization Requirements in our Developer Policy. To take this example forward, let’s say a developer offers the following:
- A “Treasure Chest” SKU that contains 200 coins, offered on Discord for $3.99
- A “Treasure Chest” SKU that contains 250 coins, offered only on the developer’s website, for $3.99
We would view these as two different offerings since they provide different benefits. However, both of these offerings can be offered on Discord today using existing Premium Apps features. By failing to offer the SKU that contains 250 coins through Premium Apps, this would be a violation of the Monetization Requirements.
Are donations or tips exempt for the Monetization Requirements? What about donation methods that allow the sender to choose the amount of their donation?
The Monetization Requirements of the Developer Policy do not currently apply to donations and tips because they are not currently supported by Premium Apps. If we introduce this support in the future, developers that offer such capabilities will be provided a reasonable amount of time to implement them through Premium Apps in order to comply.
If my app is ineligible for the App Directory, do the Monetization Requirements also not apply?
Please see the Monetized Content Policy section of our Monetization Policy for details describing the types of content that violate that policy. These content rules are separate from those that apply to apps in Discord’s discovery surfaces. Those rules can be found in our App Content Requirements Policy, which describes the content policies that must be respected for an app to be eligible for discovery features, including listing in the App Directory, on Discord.
What if I can't get a Stripe account?
If, for any reason, you’re unable to set up a Stripe account through the Monetization
> Getting Started
tab on the Developer Portal for your app, then you will not be able to use our Premium Apps features. As such, the Monetization Requirements in our Developer Policy will not apply to you if you’re unable to complete Stripe account setup for valid eligibility reasons (e.g., you are under the age of 18).
Note that we can take action against you or your app if you take steps to make yourself ineligible for a Stripe account (e.g., by violating Stripe’s Terms of Service) or otherwise evade compliance with these requirements.
I haven’t implemented support for Premium Apps features yet, but my app does currently monetize through another method (eg, Patreon, Ko-fi, my own website, etc). Am I being required to stop offering premium features through those other methods?
No, you are still permitted under our Monetization Requirements to offer premium or paid features for your app through payment options outside of Discord. Note that, per our Developer Terms of Service, developers are still required to comply with any third-party agreements, terms, or policies applicable to making your app available in any Discord client.
What if Premium Apps are not available in my region?
The Monetization Requirements in our Developer Policy will apply in regions where Discord supports monetization through Premium Apps. If a developer is located in a region where Discord does not support Premium Apps, they are exempt from the Monetization Requirements until their region is supported.
We plan to continue adding support for Premium Apps in additional regions around the world. When we introduce such support in a new region, developers in that region will be provided a reasonable amount of time to implement support for Premium Apps features pursuant to the Monetization Requirements. You can learn more about locales currently supported by Premium Apps here.
Payouts
How do payouts for multiple SKUs work? Are they pooled or are payouts done by individual SKU?
A developer team will receive its first payout when it reaches $100 in collective earnings across all of its Premium Apps SKUs. More information on how Premium Apps Payouts work can be found here. Payouts are aggregated across all sales over the last month. Developers can see detailed reporting of sales data using the data export feature in the Analytics page of the Developer Portal. You can read more in Premium Apps SKU and Store Setup.
More resources
- More info about getting started with Premium Apps can be found in the How Do I Monetize My App article
- Documentation for Premium Apps
- Discord Monetization Terms
- Discord Monetization Policy
All Discord Applications that offer paid digital benefits must comply with the requirements for Premium Apps that are described in our Developer Terms of Service, Developer Policy, Monetization Terms, and Monetization Policy.
After reviewing this and other linked articles, if you have any questions about Premium Apps required support for monetizing apps, please reach out to our Developer Support team!