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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

I mean, the obvious answer here is that Apple needs to offer companies a reasonable revenue split (like, 5% or something) for these recurring subscription scenarios where it’s obvious Apple did nothing to drum up the business and is purely functioning as a (very convenient, admittedly) credit card processor.

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You say "Apple did nothing", but the only way a company would be paying a 30% commission to Apple is if the user's initial sign-up came through their platform.

In that situation, maybe the user would have eventually signed up through a different platform, and the company could have been directly paid 100% of the price. But it's also possible that the user would simply never have signed up, in which case Apple's 30% cut would look like a steal compared to the alternative (receiving nothing).

>Apple is if the user's initial sign-up came through their platform

Which is an admission that Apple is rent seeking.

The same 'logic' could justify a 95% cut.

No it wouldn’t, because cost would probably exceed revenue in that case.

What about transactions that weren't made directly with a credit card, but rather with an Apple Store gift card purchased from a physical retailer? Possibly during a 20% off sale? Even if you elide any such discounting, Apple's transactional cost is going to be far, far higher than 5%.

I doubt there's any publicly available hard data around the costs of running the gift card ecosystem, but a number between 15 and 35 percent would not surprise me at all.

On the contrary, it's super profitable since loads of them are never spent or only partially spent, to the tune of $3B/yr:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/24/how-amazon-and-walmart-make-...

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