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I disagree, I don't really want the signing key to be $0.99 and someone just making 100+ developer accounts that can't be tracked with some leaked list of SSNs or similar. That would negate the whole point of the signing key for the end user almost entirely.

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What you're seeking is proper identity verification, not necessarily a tariff or upfront cost to even do business.

Is proper identify verification something that Apple can do at a marginal cost significantly lower than $100?

I agree that the $100 fee in no way guarantees proper identity verification has been done. I also see plenty of other unnecessary barriers the fee creates, I just don't know what an obvious alternative would be.

$100 per year for distributing opensource app is way too much. $100 may be low in your country but its half salary for month in our country.

The $100 fee is no barrier at all to professional criminals. Whereas it's a huge barrier for open source developers.

Maybe a fee waiver for oss with certain licenses and dev accounts for .edu addresses with a couple other ID requirements would be a good start.

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