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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

There's a kind of dissonance here that Patreon should be allowed to take a cut, being a platform on which creators can earn money - but Apple should not be allowed to take a cut, being a platform on which companies can operate their business.

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There's "a cut" and then there's 30%. Pretending Patreon's cut is morally or even objectively equivalent to Apple's is a little bit of a stretch.

I agree that 30% is high but the arguments I see online are generally in favor of a cut to 0%, not a reduction. If you get into the weeds of what the cut should be then it gets messy, who gets to decide? How do you determine what is actually fair for all parties?

I would argue Patreon is far more parasitic than Apple in this case, they're shaving off 10% for a pretty simple service.

Payment processors are generally really wary of services like Patreon. Cohost tried to set one up and was unable to find someone willing to stick by a commitment to process payments for an equivalent service.

I think it's reasonable to say Patreon shouldn't take 10%, but you can't ring up Visa and get a regular 2-3% rate from them for something like Patreon, most likely, due to things like brand risk, chargeback rates, etc.

Then there's all the administrative overhead involved in disbursing payments to creators from all sorts of different legal jurisdictions and reporting information to the right government agencies. I can easily imagine the operating costs of Patreon being something like 7-8% of the money they handle.

I haven't seen anyone in this particular thread calling for Apple's cut to be 0%. I do think they could afford that, but a common refrain is that Epic's rate of 12% would be sustainable, and I agree with that. It's also the case that Apple moved to a gradual rate system where low-income developers only pay 15%, which kind of proves that they don't actually need 30%, they just want 30%.

Thanks, I didn't consider these things.

Apple has already been compensated in the form of $1,000-$1,500 for the phone.

Apple was also compensated by Patreon in the form of the developer fee.

This is the triple-dip attempt.

This is what I've never understood about Apple's argument that they need to be compensated for the R&D and ops costs of running the App Store. They already have this! It's the developer program fee!!

As far as I can tell it wasn't even raised in the Epic case either.

The dissonance is conflating criticism of someone's fee structure with a demand that someone be disallowed from charging a fee. That's just dishonest spin.

No one thinks Apple shouldn't be allowed to make a buck. No one thinks Patreon shouldn't be allowed to make a buck.

But Patreon's fees are near-universally held to be reasonable and fair, and Apple's are some bullshit.

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