[jbrooksuk]

> Apple have (freely) provided Basecamp a platform to grow their business via the App Store, whilst giving Apple (effectively) nothing in return.

It's not free though, is it? You have to pay $99 a year, and purchase Apple hardware to develop and test software for their platforms. Basecamp, who hire 50+ people most likely all run Apple hardware, so that's tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars to Apple over the years.

[selykg]

How far do you think $99/yr goes in the grand scheme of things?

Cost of servers, cost of bandwidth, cost of maintenance of the App Store backend services and development of future features, technical support for developers, Xcode development, App Store review time, etc

I would hazard a guess they make nothing on that $99 at the end of the day. The cost is merely to be a gate to prevent anyone from submitting terrible apps for review. Having some monetary requirement there is just a deterrent for the lower quality stuff (obviously not all of it, but probably a rather significant amount).

[Hamuko]

>Cost of servers

How much does each individual server cost per registered paying developer?

>cost of bandwidth

If the bandwidth cost is so high, why doesn't Apple charge for it separately? And also, how much bandwidth does it actually require to deliver these applications? The HEY app is 31 megabytes. For $99, you can get 1100 GB of S3 egress. I honestly doubt that your average developer is amassing nearly that much traffic in a year.

>cost of maintenance of the App Store backend services and development of future features

Is funding the upkeep of the App Store fully on third party developers? It's a product that's sold as a part of the iPhone. And according to some speculation, $1,249 iPhone XS Max made like $500 of profit after parts, labor, R&D, admin, and other associated costs.

>technical support for developers, Xcode development

I'd also argue that this is something that shouldn't be fully paid by third party iOS developers. Having a way to develop applications for a platform is a pretty basic requirement.

>App Store review time

We should ask DHH if he feels like he's getting $99/year worth of value from this.