[mikepurvis]

I mean, the obvious answer here is that Apple needs to offer companies a reasonable revenue split (like, 5% or something) for these recurring subscription scenarios where it’s obvious Apple did nothing to drum up the business and is purely functioning as a (very convenient, admittedly) credit card processor.

[mikehearn]

You say "Apple did nothing", but the only way a company would be paying a 30% commission to Apple is if the user's initial sign-up came through their platform.

In that situation, maybe the user would have eventually signed up through a different platform, and the company could have been directly paid 100% of the price. But it's also possible that the user would simply never have signed up, in which case Apple's 30% cut would look like a steal compared to the alternative (receiving nothing).

[yyyk]

The same 'logic' could justify a 95% cut.

[thies226j]

No it wouldn’t, because cost would probably exceed revenue in that case.

[ksec]

>Apple is if the user's initial sign-up came through their platform

Which is an admission that Apple is rent seeking.

[simondotau]

What about transactions that weren't made directly with a credit card, but rather with an Apple Store gift card purchased from a physical retailer? Possibly during a 20% off sale? Even if you elide any such discounting, Apple's transactional cost is going to be far, far higher than 5%.

I doubt there's any publicly available hard data around the costs of running the gift card ecosystem, but a number between 15 and 35 percent would not surprise me at all.

[mikepurvis]

On the contrary, it's super profitable since loads of them are never spent or only partially spent, to the tune of $3B/yr:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/24/how-amazon-and-walmart-make-...