Paddle announces iOS IAP alternative that avoids Apple's 30% fees
paddle.com
paddle.com
As a seller, you understandably want that valuable buyer info.
But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam. If anyone thinks that Paddle's 10% fee might mean the final in-app purchase price would be lower which would make it worth the tradeoff to give my data, I'm not so sure about that since an interpretation of the ruling still gives Apple the right to get 30% via Paddle: https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/14/apple-can-still-charge-its-ap...
If anyone thinks getting a % of someone else's payment stream is unusual, consider how the "360" record label deals[1] with musicians are structured. All the musician's revenue (CDs, streaming, t-shirts) regardless of payment method (box office or website selling tshirts) is split with the record label. Why is that "unfair" situation even possible?!? Because the musician signed a contract agreeing to the revenue split.
You make it seems like, this is an issue. But every service that you use today has your email, Amazon, your ISP, Apple, .. everyone.
If you don't want to receive email, use a secondary email to subscribe to services and you will not be annoyed with unsolicited emails
Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ?
Seems they've just branded off the back of the Epic // Apple ruling ?
Paddle is an established company, they've just added a new mobile checkout feature.
If it's a service I use enough to possibly consider an upsell opportunity, I'll be aware of that opportunity through organically discovering it during my use of the service or through broader community discussion regarding the service. In all other cases, I don't want unsolicited contact.
I thought the same initially - but come on, this is the situation when you buy anything from anywhere else except the AppStore and we all get on with it just fine. You just decide if you trust the seller or not and block their emails if they're annoying.
Them contacting you isn't the issue though, you can put that in the app - but if you want to contact them because you messed something up, much harder.
Another annoyance is refunds. Sometimes you just want to refund someone. Maybe because you messed up somehow, or just to be nice. All you can do is send them to beg apple for one which makes for crap customer service.
No it isn't in my case because I don't use my Apple email anywhere else but Apple. It stays clean with zero spam in the inbox. Many services hide email addresses from sellers including ebay, Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, etc.
The key is that the granularity and quantity of managing email spam is reduced when all those intermediary platforms shield customer email addresses. I do have my own email domain and I can create throwaway email addresses which I use with many other websites but that's irrelevant if Apple decided to share my email with App Store developers.
>You just decide if you trust the seller or not and block their emails if they're annoying.
Why would I want the additional "mental tax" and decision tree of trust/distrust potential seller and then do extra digital housekeeping of blocking future spam? I'm still not paying any less (the court ruling said Apple is still entitled to 30% even with non-Apple payments) -- so what exactly do I gain? It looks like Paddle offers more benefits the seller but no compelling advantages to the buyer.
What companies do with the emails is... up to them. But that goes for any payment processor.
Yes I know that but that's not relevant to my point. My point is to emphasize the "hide the email" advantages.
I should have wrote my sentence like this:
- Many services (including many non-payment processor gateways) hide email addresses from sellers including ebay, Etsy, Craigslist, Amazon, etc.
>What companies do with the emails is... up to them. But that goes for any payment processor.
Not it does not for _any_ payment processor. E.g. Apple payment system does not reveal email addresses while PayPal does. Buyers then complain about followup spam because they paid via PayPal.
The assertion of "what companies do with the emails is up to them" is true and yet it is missing the crucial point of the conversation. The distinction is a layer above that: systems that don't give the companies email addresses at all.
The later text revision by Paddle that "sharing email is opt-in" is still suboptimal for consumers because that's just one more tedious item to doublecheck. I.e. is there a UI dark pattern that was silently switch from off to on. Apple payment eliminates that mental tax.
Apple is just another parasite middle man and the defenders are sounding like brainwashed fan boys.
That kind of spam is insidious and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what companies do with your data.
It looks like they've updated the text since this comment. That bullet point now says:
> Access to customer email for support
> See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for billing support.
Harvesting emails from purchases for pure marketing is GDPR-dubious at best, and Paddle's main market is the EU (because it handles EU VAT in a way that Stripe cannot), so I suspect they're backing away from any implication that you could ever actually send marketing to IAP customers legally.
For example when you buy a license you are by default opted-out of marketing or update emails [0]
And the upsell feature isn’t functional by default for everyone, you need to contact them to discuss a “moving upmarket” strategy. [1]
Until now, I’ve used Stripe, Paypal, Paddle and some local Romanian company and all of them provided me the email of the customer where it was available.
It’s up to the seller to abide by the rules, the platform isn’t at fault here.
> I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through.
Except, of course, it has NEVER happened with the thousands of apps I've bought through Apple's official stores. Not once.
I was mostly talking about avoiding Paddle as a payment processor, the app store isn’t a payment processor so we can’t really compare them.
I’d still say the spam came from a seller sharing your address, or leaking it by mistake, not from how Paddle works.
If your issue would be Paddle related and recurrent, I don’t think they would still be in the business as trust is very important when handling money and customer data and soon no one would choose them anymore.
Now let me add my opinion on this: Should we have a platform that allows consumers to make a single choice ie) choose Apple, and by proxy never needs to trust developers at scale? Absolutely. Many people, especially developers, would rather trade some developer flexibility (multiple payment processors) and push some responsibility onto Apple’s users to continue making an opt-in choice for Apple. I choose them for my phone. I just them again for in-app purchases. Continue making choices in support of Apple for each layer of the system. I am not really sure what this buys the consumer. What is Apple blocking from you by forcing you to make that choice once, and then being forced to “never trust developers at scale” for the remainder of being an iPhone customer. Is it blocking “innovation”? Some people think that. I don’t see it. I see a company that pushes the hardware envelope with sensors, battery, operating system, etc, and works hard to give developers access to THOSE things. Maybe not a users email address, but is that really innovation anyway? I looked at this Paddle payment processor and they have some things like “pause subscription”. Is pause really an innovation that is being blocked by only using Apple’s system? Google has supported pause for a long time. Users want it, but to developers really want users pausing their subs? probably not.
I view any attempt at using regulation to prevent or block or eliminate this valid choice as the actually anti-competitive play.
Except for Apple who would not have shared my address. Bad sellers on the platform is the platforms problem.
Can you prove this?
If you implement IAP with Apple's billing system, Apple doesn't share your credentials with the seller. There's nothing to prove, you can implement it yourself if you like.
And the platform can help the customer gain additional privacy from the seller, by offering them “burner” style e-mail addresses for their purchase.
I would submit that any platform which doesn’t do these things is “at fault”, at least from the customer point of view.
Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs? As a consumer, I sure hope apple forces some kind of privacy standards compliance.
I read through the decision when it first came down, and while Apple was blocked from restricting third-party payment systems, there was no language preventing Apple from mandating their own payment system alongside third-party options.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple dropped their 30% cut for their own system, but kept a 30% commission for third-party systems.
In practice, my bet is that Apple uses their opaque app approval process and ability to change the rules at any time to make it arbitrarily hard for apps that use paddle to stay in the app store.
I guess my point is that I doubt they'll do anything of the sort.
Until a judge rules that Apple doesn't have control over its own App Store (which the Epic ruling explicitly reaffirmed that it does), this is only going to get silly and bloated.
Apple is just using their anticompetitive stance to charge 10x more than the standard industry rate for payment card processing.
I'm not in the business of selling apps, but I enjoy writing books. The best way to sell books, is to build a mailing list of fans so that you can reach them when you have another book ready. It is not about reaching people who do not want to receive your comms. It is about having a direct and reliable connection to people who actually want to engage with you.
There is no easy way to do that in the App Store. It is important that people own their own platform, that includes being able to know who your customers are.
I'm not saying to spam people who purchased stuff from you with upsells, that is B.S. and I hate it as much as everyone else. But being able to reach out to them when there is a new version of an app, or something useful to say about whatever they purchased is valuable.
The hardest thing this day is not how to build a great app or how to write a great book. Our main challenge is getting noticed amid all the algorithmic shenanigans. Being blind about who purchase your stuff just adds more friction to that challenge.
Of course, I will never touch that form, and most people won't, but that's not because Apple prevent us.
Customer emails are available, but it's explicit that they haven't opted-in for marketing, so if you're subject to GDPR or anything similar (most Paddle vendors, since I think the EU is Paddle's core market) then you can't use the email for anything but necessary account setup & support. Meanwhile audience emails are explicitly fair game for upsells/offers/etc.
"Developers cannot use information obtained within the app to target individual users outside of the app to use purchasing methods other than in-app purchase (such as sending an individual user an email about other purchasing methods after that individual signs up for an account within the app)."
You have to flag that user's email in your database as permanently tainted and unable to learn certain truths even if they have long switched to another competitors' device.
When I buy stuff at the grocery store, I'm not the customer of the companies that produce food. Similarly, I just want to get your app, not become a marketing target for dozens of software vendors with varying privacy and data retention policies. I don't want you to upsell me on anything, it's literally the opposite of friendly to me as a consumer.
I don’t get any spam from Apple either.
I want to buy things and not be bothered by follow up emails and whatnot.
I'm not saying that the way Paddle implemented it is the correct way forward. Personally, I'd rather there was an opt-in option to share data on the payment form. This way, if you want to be in contact with the seller, you can flag it and the default option is not sharing. This is simple and would allow you to remain "not a customer" while letting those who want to be in touch to have an easy path forward. This is not possible inside the App Store.
The App Store model —and Amazon and others as well— make it really hard for you to find who the customer is. That is not because they're thinking of you. They're doing that as yet another vendor lock-in mechanism to prevent the seller from leaving or doing any kind of business with that customer away from them.
As ~NhanH said in another comment in this thread, you can put a form on an app. Yes, you can jump through a lot of hops, and maybe Apple will allow it through. It is death by a thousand paper cuts. From their PoV it is their customer, not yours. From their PoV, the seller is a customer as well.
I don't think Apple is necessarily altruistic here. But I am able to essentially use them to protect me against people who will abuse my information.
And I also think that developers miss the fact that, at least for a lot of us, this model makes it MORE likely that we will purchase your product. I'm much more likely to try a new app out knowing that it's not going to generate a ton of emails or that my credit card information will leak.
Maybe others are less dogmatic about it, but I truly appreciate having Apple as a "connection shield" between me and hundreds of thirsty app developers wanting to reach out and tell me all the great things they want to tell me.
For most services I now sign up directly through a developer. I also find for services I subscribe to developers provide WAY better customer support than Apple.
I have a friend who is a voracious reader of Kindle ebooks. She uses Amazon's tools to "follow" certain authors and get notified by any new releases. Yes, she has visited some authors' websites directly and even though they have the aggressive popup for "sign up for my mailing list", she deliberately avoids submitting her email and having a direct relationship with the author.
She'd be one of the buyers that's "really Amazon's customer" instead of soapdog's customer. But being shielded from you via Amazon is what she wants. Have you considered that millions of customers think like her?
An author on Amazon has the option of being exclusive to them, which unlocks some perks. Amazon algorithm will push exclusives more often then it pushes non-exclusives.
The reason I mentioning this is because Amazon makes it harder for the author by disguising all its non-competitive practices as them thinking about the reader. It is not, all these are vendor lock-in schemes.
There are many other stores for eBooks. Selling on them prevents you from being exclusive to Amazon, which in turns makes it push your book less often than it pushes those in the exclusive program. Trying to price your book higher makes you lose money.
Your friend has every right not to be forced into contact with an author. That is how it should be. The reason why most authors are trying to get your friend on a mailing list is so that they can have a platform that is not 100% controlled by Amazon algos. It is a hard business being an author, and it is much harder if you have no control whatsoever over your own platform.
I think that they key aspect I want to highlight here is that I don't think your friend or anyone should be put into a mailing list against their will. I hate upsells too. What I'm saying is that all those platforms make it extra hard for you to make sure you can contact the customers who actually want to be in contact with you.
However.
The world is not full of good actors, because bad actors can make $$$$ by selling your information to third party spam and scammers.
There is no way, currently, to reward good actors, and punish bad actors… and the downside of the bad actors far out weighs the benefit provided by the good actors.
So, while I see your point, the issue here is that in a wider context people are actively abusing that channel, and there no way to stop them without stopping everyone.
So, sympathetic, but the problem here isn’t apple, it’s the folk who abuse and resale customer data… and I certainly don’t have a solution to that; but no one else seems to have one either.
No thanks. That's what I use book stores (either physical or electronic for)
(Also it's hours in a car to the nearest physical new book store.)
Feel free to put a link to your mailing list at the end of the book, and I might sign up. Please don't sign me up because I purchase a book from you.
Related to the comments about Paddle giving you the email addresses of your users: I went with Paddle over integrated Google payments at the time because Google gave you no access to your paid users or their payment methods and I was worried about Google payments shutting down - this turned out to be a great choice when Google deprecated their Chrome payment features with minimal migration options ("There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration").
Not predicting Apple would do this but you need to keep your options open where you can so you can keep your customers if the worst happens. 30% fees is crazy in comparison too.
That said, I wish they'd improve their API. It's very limited, poorly designed in some places and extraordinarily slow in others. The checkout & tools are good enough that you can ignore it for a long time, but eventually you want to integrate with it and it's a massive pain.
Definitely the worst part of the product, and simultaneously the best thing about Stripe, which does occasionally tempt me to jump ship...
Which parts? I do remember the docs being quite sparse when I was doing the initial integration. Most of my support questions about "how do you do X with the API?" were answered quickly but the answer was often "you can't" for a few surprising things (like grabbing a subscription via email lookup but maybe this has changed). Saying that, once I had it set up I haven't had to touch it and haven't had any issues, but my needs aren't that complex. A basic portal to let users check and edit their subscriptions would be nice though instead of everyone having to build this themselves.
Apple is still entitled to a 30% commission. The commission is the licensing fee for Apple's IP
From the court ruling:
> At step three, Epic Games has identified no suitable less restrictive alternative for Apple’s use of IAP based on the current record. The only alternative that Epic Games proposes is that Apple be barred from restricting or deterring in any way “the use of in-app payment processors other than IAP.” This proposed alternative is deficient for several reasons:
> First, and most significant, as discussed in the findings of facts, IAP is the method by which Apple collects its licensing fee from developers for the use of Apple’s intellectual property.
> Even in the absence of IAP, Apple could still charge a commission on developers. It would simply be more difficult for Apple to collect that commission
> Indeed, while the Court finds no basis for the specific rate chosen by Apple (i.e., the 30% rate) based on the record, the Court still concludes that Apple is entitled to some compensation for use of its intellectual property.
I had contacted Paddle for UK VAT invoice for our Setapp for Teams subscription and their incompetence is phenomenon: first they used an EU VAT number (this is post-Brexit), then they fixed the VAT number but the amounts are in the wrong currency, one of the support agents even get my name wrong once...
Most importantly, I should not even have to ask for a VAT invoice in the first place.
Paddle has been a long-term supporter of Mac apps for many years (including CleanMyMac, Framer, Tower and more) and we’re excited about the prospect of supporting iOS apps as well – something we’ve not been able to do so far.
We’re heavily invested in keeping customer data safe and secure. We think app developers should be able to support and interact with their customers directly rather than having to go through Apple or another 3rd party to resolve any issues. Our solution will give app creators that opportunity – one that’s already the case for sales made on vendor websites.
Any kind of marketing comms will require customers to have opted in through a checkbox in the checkout process. We’re just looking to give developers the ability to ask, like is commonly done during browser-based purchases.
I’m super keen to keep an open dialogue with any developers interested in an alternative to how you currently sell your apps in iOS so don’t hesitate to reach out to me christian at paddle com
Sure the fee is a bummer, but that’s not my problem as a consumer. If it makes the subscription more expensive I’ll just buy it on their website.
But I feel this change will produce all sorts of awful web-hybrid user experiences.
If it makes the subscription more expensive I’ll just buy it on their website.
IAP is convenient, but I don't think Apple is truly motivated by the customer as much as they are charging a tax.
I’m going to pay 3-5% for payment processing no matter how I look at it. So paying apple 15% to handle that is acceptable to me.
It’s one of those things that should be cheaper and is too much, but better than the alternative.
The payment part is the worst part of the purchase experience for me. I play a game that has a Mac version through Epic and an iOS version. Buying on iOS is easy, one click. Buying on Mac is a pain with some modal web frame pop up to a payment processor where I have to enter my payment info every time. EVERY TIME! I’ve already logged in. They know me.
Of course the price to me is the same in both situations.
So alternate payment processors will just be shittier for users. Bad UX, riskier data, and the same price.
Unless you jumped straight from school into a company with the goal to make mad money and nothing else, some of us became developers precisely because computer technology shaped our lives and became our passion.
We want to give our users the best experience possible, and don’t really care about their email addresses and credit card numbers and shit. And Apple’s IAP is closest to the ideal system:
• Minimal clicks and no jarring exits out of the app into third-party websites
• No need to re-enter payment and personal info at multiple places
• Biometric verification
• Preserves privacy and protects financial info
• Shows all receipts and subscriptions in one place
Even if Apple took a 50% I would still want the users of my app to have access to those benefits, because that’s what I would like all other devs to give me in their apps.
Is this a PR stunt?
Judge explicitly said Apple is allowed to collect their 30% commission even if customer uses a different payment provider.
“In such a hypothetical world, developers could potentially avoid the commission while benefitting from Apple’s innovation and intellectual property free of charge. The Court presumes that in such circumstances that Apple may rely on imposing and utilizing a contractual right to audit developers annual accounting to ensure compliance with its commissions, among other methods. Of course, any alternatives to IAP (including the foregoing) would seemingly impose both increased monetary and time costs to both Apple and the developers.”
Thanks for correcting me.
A more fair comparison would be andorid. Or the Windows Phone, where Microsoft took 20%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone
Just because everyone does the same thing on a mobile phone doesn’t make it any more sensible.
I could easily make the statement "Microsoft gets a cut of everything purchased on Xbox, why shouldn't Apple?"
To which I suspect your response would be waving your hands around something that is ill defied (General Purpose Computing), and then trying to define it to fit your narrative.
Microsoft chose to create XBox as a platform where developers who didn't pay them a cut could not sell software.
Microsoft attempted to convert Windows into a platform where developers who didn't pay them a cut could not sell software with Windows RT, but it failed in the marketplace.
Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Google, Valve, Epic etc all take their cut.
But it’s because I have a choice. I can choose to use Valve, or Epic, or nothing at all.
Hell, I can even choose never to use the Nintendo store, and just purchase plain cardridges.
The same is not true for the others, but especially not for Apple.
Do you really think that Nintendo doesn't get their cut on plain cartridges?
Note, you cannot deduct the 30% your electric utility charges you, nor the 30% your PC monitor maker charges you, nor the 30% your desk maker charges, you'll have to figure out how to finance your development out of the other -40%.
If this is not acceptable obviously you could have written your reply to my comment under any other comment. There are many other comments you could freely leave your reply to me under. You choose to use my comment to base your reply to no doubt because that's the only one I read. Still of course, I do not have a monopoly on replies to me under all posts on the internet. Replies under my comment are of course not a monopoly because you can freely reply to me anywhere else. For example, you could have replied to my post on your grandma's Facebook.
And here goes one of the reasons Apple wanted control in the first place.
This is not a customer friendly change.
Blood is in the water, and the sharks are howling.
But Judge Rogers wrote "Apple could still charge a commission... it would simple be more difficult for Apple to collect that commission."
That indicates that if Apple decides to charge a commission on alternative IAP and figures out how to collect it, then developers may not save any money and may only benefit in terms of being able to sidestep Apple's user privacy requirements.
Hard pass from me. Thanks.
Because it’s progressive to do so.
And it begs the question - is "cost-plus" the only valid pricing model?
e.g. A single transaction of $10,000 does not Apple more than $100 other than the beforementioned financial transaction fee.
The real question is why I don't have to pay them 30% for software and transactions on my MacBook. Because once you consider that most of those arguments are thrown out.
I’m certain that they could not continue to provide the App Store in its current form without any fee.