They aren't charging the fee for payment processing, they're collecting the fee via payment processing. I don't understand why people keep making this mistake. Hell even Epic made it and lost horribly when they made it. The fee is a sales commission, you pay it because you want access to the customer base. They are allowed to deliver you literally nothing at all in additional services and still charge you a fee.

The other stuff they provide exists to sweeten the deal.

I believe the article cited 15% rather than 30% for subscriptions, or 11% if you process your own payments. So [.15, .11] —> [.04, .00], or an overall discount of 11% off subscription revenue they take through the platform.

It sounded to me that, in exchange for that favorable per-subscription rate, Spotify paid $50,000,000 into a “success fund,” whatever that means. $50mm / .11 = $454mm... sounds like they’re basically paying the equivalent of Play Store commission on half a billion’s worth of revenue, without any guarantee that they’ll actually be able to sell that much new growth through Play Store. That feels like sharing the risk in a way that isn’t too out of the domain of reason.

From [0], they added about $2bn in revenue year-on-year in 2022. Although we don’t know the term of this Play Store agreement (or what a “success fund” is), paying an amount equivalent to the normal commission on 1/5 of that total annual growth figure seems like a pretty nontrivial amount to commit.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/

30% is because most transactions, early on, were around $1. And processing fees are usually $0.25 + ~3% = so 28% of the average transaction.

When you start applying that 30% to $15 spotify subs, $50 uber rides, $60 video game, then a bunch of in-app purchases ranging in value; the math falls apart and if you have scale to do it, the negotiated rate makes more sense for those businesses given the average transaction amount.