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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

Sure, I buy things through PayPal a lot. It’s purely out of convenience. It saves me the steps of entering in my address and credit card info when buying something online. If the checkout page offers Apple Pay or Stripe, I’ll use those instead, because they’re even easier. I’ve never had any problems with any of these payment services.

I also like that both PayPal and Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions, so I don’t have to argue with someone on the phone to cancel. My understanding is that Apple subscriptions incur a 30% fee for the developer (and often a price hike for me), so it’s nice that PayPal offers something similar without that fee.

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PayPal still charges about a 3-4% + 50 cent fee. Not as large as the exorbitant 30%, but still a lot compared to the tens of cents it costs for IBAN payments in the EU

Credit cards charge something similar, I think?

Unfortunately not everyone accepts IBAN, and I don't have a credit/debit card at the moment (they're not common here), so PayPal provides an okay solution for now. I pay my Linode VPS with it for example, because that's essentially the only option I have at the moment.

Sure but PayPal in North America is not competing against EU. It is competing with Square, Stripe, etc, and those fees are quite close to those other companies.

The german antitrust agency recently started an investigation into PayPal because they forbid businesses to offer lower prices to customers which use a different paying method. If they succeed pressure on PayPal might increase if you pay 2% or so less for using a bank payment.

[...] Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions [...]

That's only a thing for Apple in-app subscribtions though, not for Apple Pay, right?

Supposedly there is a new management UI for recurring payments at supported merchants/PSPs, but I haven't encountered it in the wild yet:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213041

https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/merchant-tokens/

This was announced at WWDC in 2022 but payment gateways are still adding support for it. Should be more visible in 2023.

Apple doesn’t charge merchants anything for using Apple Pay, they charge the banks for being able to have their cards in Apple wallet. Merchants still get charged by the banks but Apple doesn’t take anything from them.

The 30% fees is on App Store purchases

Is there any way to subscribe to a service using Apple Pay without it counting as App Store and incurring the 30%? There’s a lot of news stories about Spotify, Netflix, etc fighting with Apple over this.

Apple Pay (like Apple wallet) doesn’t charge anything inherently. If you’re buying a subscription (like to an app) through the App Store, with or without Apple Pay, they charge 30%. These are two different things.

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