You could, however, give as much of the product away as you can for free (less $100 a year for developer account) and then Apple is basically paying you to distribute it on their platform. That's definitely not the mafia.

If you want to charge money, Apple will collect it for you and take a cut. If you don't want that deal, you can still distribute your app for free, you just can't charge money for it in the app. You can still charge money for the service, but you have to do that on your own website and infrastructure (a la Netflix, etc.), not Apple's.