[grujicd]

It's much more expensive on Windows side of things. DigiCert and Sectigo are now in the $700--$1000 range per year for regular OV code signing certificate.

Microsoft has it's own Azure Artifact Signing which is comparable to Apple yearly cost (give or take), but since a month ago installers signed with it often display SmartScreen warnings [1]. Even though Microsoft controls both pieces!

Store option is not free for organizations (although it's a one-time setup fee), but the worse thing is it forces you to its simplified licensing/trial model, typically not compatible with B2B software where paid upgrades, yearly support contracts, controlled updates, extended trials are used.

[1] https://github.com/Azure/artifact-signing-action/issues/128#...

[hermitcrab]

Would be interested to hear a bit more about selling commercial software through the MS App Store. My Easy Data Transform software has a free trial (7 days, do not have to be consecutive) and is a one-time fee of $99 to buy. How would that work?

[grujicd]

Hah, since 3 days ago it's now free registrations even for companies. [1] I strongly suspect that problems with SmartScreen are a not so subtle way to push us to the Store. Good thing is you don't have to use their ecommerce and pay anything per license. But I don't know whether we can just put trial there and keep existing trial and licensing logic on our own? For me the problem would also be automatic updates, as I don't want all users of v5 to be automatically upgraded to v6. Perhaps separate listings for major versions are the way to go, at least in my case. Since it's now a free registration I just might try it, sometimes it's faster to do it than to go through documentation to find out whether it's possible or not.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/05/07/publis...

[hermitcrab]

Sounds worth investigating.