Amazon has told developers who are signed up to the Alexa Developer Rewards Program that their monthly payments will end at the end of June. The announcement follows a decision to end the program under which Alexa developers were offered free credits for Amazon Web Services.
The decision has probably been prompted by the number of Alexa skills. Skills are like apps for Alexa.
The Alexa Developer Rewards website is still suggesting you can monetize your skills, saying:
"Organizations and individuals can publish skills in the Alexa Skills Store to reach and delight customers on hundreds of millions of Alexa devices."
However, members of the rewards program have been sent an email telling them that while they have
"played a critical role in the success of Alexa and we appreciate your continued engagement"
the program has run its course.
The program was launched in 2017 to encourage developers to create apps for the Alexa environment, which was new at that point. Since then, over 160,000 skills have been made available, and new LLM-powered tools have been launched. This has prompted Amazon to drop the programs, the first of which provided developers with up to $100 a month in credit for Amazon Web Services. The Developer Rewards program paid developers who came up with popular skills according to how many people used their skills, and while most developers made little or no money, some were apparently getting payments up to thousands of dollars a month at the start of the program. Payments have been dropping over recent years, though, and industry watchers say the move to end the payments is in line with other Alexa cutbacks at Amazon. This has seen Amazon lay off hundreds of people from its Alexa division, coinciding with a move to use more AI for Alexa-related development.
Amazon points out that developers can still make money by offering in-skill purchases.
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