I posted this reply in the Echo forums here:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/51893/future-of-high-volume-free-skills.html, thought this would be a good place to post it as well.
One my skills made it to the Customer Favorites area in the Echo app, and I noticed I was getting charged for "data transfer". So naturally, I decided to use account linking then use the "Freemium to Premium" model and charge a small fee for the full-version (using an external website not through the Echo itself).. Guess what happened? I made a little money at first, then 1 star reviews until it has become invisible. People do not like to pay to use the Echo, as the skills are supposed to be free. Another bad thing, I had to set up an RDS and an EC2 (this was after I had set the account linking up) , because my shared hosting DB couldn't handle the requests. At it's lowest price, those are $17 to $20 a month to run the Micro.T2. The skill did make money, but not nearly enough as it fell from existence when the 1 stars reviews nuked it from orbit. So what did I end up with in the end? A little money, and now a skill with low reviews, so even if they decide to monetize in the future, that skill will still be useless. So now I've removed Account Linking, and waiting to get certified to see if the skill can re-cooperate. I have another good skill I'm working on now that I'm convinced will be another hit, but I'm unsure about releasing it until some sort of monetization is available.
To me, this seems like something that should have already been worked out. When I first started making skills, I did it "just for fun" and for the T-Shirt. But when real money is coming out my pocket (even if it's just 5 cents a month), I feel I should be compensated in some way. Even free AWS services would be better than NOTHING. Why should developers waste their time with the Echo without monetization? It's bad enough putting up with the horrible reviews with no way to directly respond to them, and then to pay out of pocket to provide content for Amazon's showcase device is almost too much to handle.
Good skills take time. That's a fact. Fact spitting skills are nice and all, but good quality skills take time. I'm not sure I want to spend anymore time with creating these skill. Amazon if you read this, monetize the Echo! A multi-billion dollar company not paying the developer who provide content for your device, shame on you.