Comment by vjvjvjvjghv
12 hours ago
Jobs was a greedy bastard like all the other CEOs. The difference is that he also had mostly good taste as far as products go.
12 hours ago
Jobs was a greedy bastard like all the other CEOs. The difference is that he also had mostly good taste as far as products go.
At that time 30% was not something you would consider high in contrast to the situation before the advent of app stores.
This is outrageously wrong. Back in 2011, the pricing model for "an app in your pocket" was 99 cents. The universal pricing model of apps was a one-time fee and the pricing range was that of an mp3 roughly. 30% of that is a lot. App sales worked only in volume.
If you sold software over the internet, you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so and if your shareware was $30, the transaction fee essentially was ~$1. Stripe had roughly the same fee when they launched. You had more traditional credit card merchants and when I inquired one in Germany back in 2010, it was more or less in the same ballpark (~10%).
In Europe, you could also just get money wired, which cost you something like 0-10 cents.
30% for payment processing were always extremely high.
Edit: The only thing where you had no other options was when you tried to sell stuff on the internet for $1, because the flat fee part of credit card processors would eat up all of that. Apple indeed helped here a little bit, because it was always 30% and no fixed part.
> you had PayPal, which had a flat fee of $0.35 + 1.7% or so
PayPal also offered a "micropayments" rate (that I used in Cydia), wherein they charged $0.05+5% (which is much better for payments under $12).
I was thinking about something comparable, where there is a digital storefront, payment processing, security, delivering, installing on all my devices and so on...
Steam comes to mind. They take 30% (and I think 5% for credit card or whatever).
So I do not think that "outrageously wrong" is characterizing my remarks adequately.
1 reply →
It's not a "processing fee". It's an distribution/access/market fee for the captive audience that Apple has spent tens of billions developing and supporting.
If you think you can make any money selling software on the internet and paying nothing other than $0.35 + 1.7%, think again.
4 replies →
Is bluffing how you want to show up?
Processing fees were way less than 30% before the App Store. And considering how overrun the App Store now is with junk apps there is basically no service Apple provides other than taking money.