The Developer Enterprise Program plan is $299/year and enables corporate/internal distribution to employees.

Most people only need the first, but the second is also an option. And if you need both, it's technically $398/year for the great honor.

Then try selling through a grocery or drugstore chain.

But good luck trying to sell your new iphone app through your own website.

At least with android, you could sell an APK download or sell through a different app store.

It was priced and designed for companies to be buying as a bundle with other licensing. individual devs would frequently use some of the loopholes through licensing partners to commit to what was basically a three year subscription that spread the cost. For companies, it could mitigate some of the costs associated with the proliferation of environments that needed to be licensed from top-to-bottom. Later, these may stop being eligible for MSDN use and generate more revenue. License auditing was real and gave visibility into this usage.

VMware still have a program like this going for their admin user base. It gets recommended by the r/homelab folks who haven't adopted Proxmox.

Or $800 for a COBOL|FORTRAN|C|AP/L compiler, plus $600 for a debugger.

At least when you upgraded the next year, you got $20 off!