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Apple's EU commission cut is worth five points to a small dev. Do the arithmetic before you take it.

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From 1 October, leaving Apple In-App Purchase drops a Small Business Program developer from 15% to 10% in the EU. On a 4.99 euro subscription, a processor's fixed per-transaction fee can eat most of that on its own - and your choice locks for 12 months.

Apple updated the Developer Program License Agreement on 18 August, and the new EU business terms go into effect on 1 October. The coverage I've read frames it as Apple finally opening up. That's true in a structural sense and mostly irrelevant to anyone running a small subscription app, because the interesting question isn't whether you can leave Apple's payment system. It's whether the arithmetic works. For most of us it doesn't, and it's worth being able to say why rather than just having a feeling about it.

Here are the actual rates, from Apple's own support pages.

Apple In-App Purchase: 26%, or 15% if you're in the Small Business Program, the Mini Apps or Video Partner Programs, or on an auto-renewable subscription after the subscriber's first year.

Alternative payment processing inside your app: 20%, or 10% for those same groups.

Out-of-app offers with an actionable link: a 15% store services commission, or 10% for those groups, on anything bought within 7 days of the tap.

Apps distributed outside the App Store entirely - an alternative marketplace, or your own website - pay a 5% Core Technology Commission, which replaces the old per-install Core Technology Fee. The Initial Acquisition Fee and Store Services Fee are gone.

So if you're a small developer on the App Store, the headline is: 15 down to 10. Five points.

Now the part nobody puts in the headline. Five points of what?

Take a 4.99 euro monthly subscription. Five points is about 25 cents a month. Stripe's published EEA card rate is 1.5% + 0.25 euro per successful transaction - that's a vendor quoting its own price, so check the current page for whatever processor you'd actually use, but the shape is standard across the industry: a percentage plus a fixed fee. On 4.99 euro that fixed 25-cent component alone is roughly 5% of the transaction. Before you've paid a single basis point of the percentage, the entire saving is gone.

The fixed fee is the whole story for small-ticket subscriptions, and it's the thing the commission-rate debate never mentions, because the debate is conducted by people selling 80-euro-a-month software where 25 cents rounds to nothing. If your price point is under about 10 euro, moving off IAP is arithmetically a wash at best. If it's 2.99, you are paying for the privilege.

And the five points isn't only buying you payment processing. Read what else transfers to you. You become responsible for collecting and remitting VAT across EU storefronts. You handle refunds, chargebacks, failed-payment recovery and subscription management. You handle the support tickets - Apple says plainly it won't be able to help your customers with refunds or purchase history. Your transactions won't appear in the user's App Store purchase history, won't work with Family Sharing, and won't surface in Report a Problem. And you owe Apple a monthly transaction report within 15 days of month end, which must include refunds, corrections, renewals and transactions that didn't result in a purchase. Apple has audit rights on it. Non-payment can mean offsetting your proceeds in other markets, or removal from the App Store.

That's a finance function. You'd be trading five points for a finance function.

Two more details that changed my read.

The choice locks for 12 months. Once you select your payment options - IAP, alternative processing, out-of-app offers, or a combination - you must maintain that choice across all EU storefronts for a year. This is the one I'd underline. It converts a reversible experiment into a bet. You cannot ship it in October, watch conversion drop in November, and quietly revert.

The entitlement has an OS floor. Apple's docs say the entitlement profile only works on iOS 26.2 and iPadOS 26.2 or later, and 26.6 for macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS. So on day one, alternative payments don't reach your whole EU base - they reach the slice that's updated. You'd be building two payment paths and maintaining both, indefinitely, for a partial rollout.

Who should take this? If your average transaction is large, the fixed fee stops mattering and five points is real money. If you already run web billing with tax handling and a support process, the marginal cost is close to zero and you should probably do it. If you're at genuine scale, 5% via Web Distribution instead of 15-26% on the App Store is a different conversation entirely, and worth having properly. Notably, Apple also dropped the requirement to have an EU legal entity to operate a marketplace or use Web Distribution, which makes that path reachable for more teams than before.

What I'd actually do this week, if you sell to EU users: work out your five points as a euro figure per transaction, then put your processor's real fixed fee next to it. That's a ten-minute exercise and it answers the question. Separately, note that agreeing to the updated agreement is the gate for all of this - and that the old Alternative Terms Addendum is being superseded on 1 October whether you engage or not.

The Murror version is boring. We're a small subscription app and we're staying on In-App Purchase, and I want to be honest that I didn't reach that by principle. I reached it by writing 25 cents next to 25 cents and noticing they cancelled. The thing I nearly got wrong was reading "Apple cut the commission" as good news that needed acting on, when the correct response to most platform changes is to do the arithmetic and then do nothing.

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From the page side, the line nobody puts in that arithmetic is what the checkout has to do afterwards. Apple's payment sheet carries the trust for free, and once the payment moves onto a web page, that page has to earn it with layout, refund copy and logos, and someone has to keep it doing that. That is not a fee, so it never shows up in the comparison.

  That's a fair hit, and it's the cost I'd have left out. Apple's sheet is doing trust work I never had to build or maintain, and it doesn't appear on either side of the fee comparison because nobody invoices you for it. The version of that I've felt is narrower but real: people trust a payment sheet they already recognise, and a first-time subscriber to a journalling app is exactly the person who hesitates. Adding a page I have to keep earning that on is a cost with no line item.

  The cheap way to borrow some of it back is to put the cancellation and refund terms above the card field rather than below it. A first-time subscriber hesitating is usually worried about being stuck, and that is the one worry a page can answer for free.

The fixed fee is the part I'd push hardest on, because it's the only variable in your arithmetic you actually control.

Same 25 cents, but count how many times a year it fires. A 4.99 subscription touches the card twelve times, so on 59.88 of revenue you've paid 3 euro in fixed fees before a single basis point of percentage. That's your 5%. Sell the same 59.88 once and you pay it once, 0.42%. The percentage part doesn't move either way. So the shape of the transaction is worth about four and a half points, which is the same size as the whole Apple concession you're weighing, and it doesn't lock you in for a year.

That's the trade I took, though our products aren't the same shape. Mine is a flashcard generator, episodic by nature, and it sells credits in one-time packs that don't expire instead of a monthly plan, for exactly this reason. Nobody was ever going to buy 4.99 of it twelve times a year. Murror is a habit product where the value arrives every week, so a subscription is probably the honest match for what you deliver, and I'm only talking about the fee, not your model.

  I checked your numbers before replying and they hold: 3 euro of fixed fees on 59.88 is 5.01%, the same sum charged once is 0.42%, so the gap is about 4.6 points. That is the better framing and I wish I'd written the annual view instead of the per-transaction one, because it makes the point harder - transaction frequency is worth roughly what Apple is offering, and it doesn't come with a 12-month lock. Agreed on the model too. A journal only works if you keep coming back, so credit packs would be selling the wrong shape of thing even if the fees favoured it. But that means the fixed fee fires twelve times for us and there's no pricing trick that avoids it, which is most of why staying on IAP was easy.

I suggest adding a simple spreadsheet template so readers can plug their price and processor fee and see the break even point instantly without guessing like me every single day


  Fair ask, and honestly the whole thing fits in one line, so here it is rather than a file. Break-even is where 0.05 x price equals (processor rate x price) + fixed fee. With the Stripe EEA numbers I quoted, 1.5% + 0.25 euro, that solves to about 7.14 euro. Under that price you lose money moving off IAP, over it you start gaining, and it's pure fee arithmetic - substitute your own processor's published rate. Two caveats I'd put on the same row so nobody reads the break-even as a green light: it counts only fees, not the VAT remittance, refunds, chargebacks and support you inherit, and the choice locks for 12 months. So 7.14 is the floor, not the threshold - you want to clear it by a margin that pays for a finance function.

I love your closing line about doing nothing being the smartest response to most platform changes and I agree completely

  Thank you. Though I'd put one guardrail on it, because "do nothing" is only the right answer once you've done the arithmetic - the same line without the ten minutes of maths is just inertia wearing a good argument as a costume. The deadlines are also where it stops applying: this one has a 1 October date and a 12-month lock, so doing nothing is an active choice here rather than a deferral, and it's worth knowing that's what you're picking.

Outside App Store economics entirely the same fixed fee logic decided how I priced my own thing. I run a web product with a flat one time fee instead of a subscription, and the reasoning was the same shape as what Siarhei laid out, a fixed processor fee charged once against a fixed fee charged twelve times a year is not a small difference, it is most of the margin on a low ticket item. The bit I would add is that this is not only an Apple decision. Anyone pricing a low ticket product should run the same ten minute exercise against their own processor before defaulting to a subscription because that is what everyone else does.

  Agreed that the fee logic generalises, and your framing is the more useful one - the Apple version is just where it happens to have a date attached. The one place I'd resist generalising is the conclusion rather than the exercise. Fixed fees push you toward fewer, larger transactions, but so does nothing else about a product, and if the value shows up weekly then a one-time fee is cheaper to collect and worse at describing what you sell. We're subscription despite the fee maths, not because of it. What I'd take from your comment is that the ten-minute exercise belongs at pricing time, before the model is load-bearing, rather than at platform-change time when you're stuck defending a number you picked for other reasons.