[tylerhall]

Do you think the exposure the Mac App Store offers is worth Apple's 30% cut along with the lack of upgrade options for customers? Why not also (or in place of) sell your software directly through your website?

I'm the author of the article in question, and with my current sales infrastructure, I'm able to spin up and sell a new product (SKU) in a matter of hours. Since I've been doing this for seven years, am I now overestimating the amount of work it takes to setup and sell your app independently?

[milen]

I don't know about your jurisdiction but in most EU countries, the sale proceeds from Apple lie outside the scope of VAT. Thus, you need to subtract your effective VAT rate and the net effective rate that you end up paying on the MAS is about 10-15%. Which is very close to what you would pay for, say, FastSpring ("You have the option to pay either 8.9% flat or 5.9% plus $.95 per transaction" [1]). The biggest advantage of the MAS is that it's a distribution channel preinstalled on every single Mac - that's extremely valuable.

As you say, you would ideally sell on both the MAS and outside. In terms of selling outside the MAS, it does come with some overhead, mostly related to VAT. Even worse, the EU is changing the VAT rules starting from 2015 (the rule change itself is designed to remove the competitive advantage of big companies to be based in EU states with low VAT and sell products in countries with high(er) rates):

> Currently, the place of taxation for digital services supplies is determined by your location as the supplier of the services. However, from 1 January 2015, the place of taxation will be determined by the location of the consumer.

It's not a big deal since you can just sign up for the VAT MOSS but it's still more hassle than just putting up an app on the MAS. Note that all of this applies after your exceed the VAT threshold, which is different in different EU member states.

[1] http://www.fastspring.com/pricing.php [2] http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/posmoss/

[hemancuso]

We can't get in the MAS because we can't comply with the rules, but the ease of telling somebody to go purchase an app from a store where they already have their credit card on file is huge. I run a custom version of Potion Store, so it's only the cost of a Linode plus credit card processing. But I see most other indie devs who sell on their own use FastSpring [or similar] which charges about 10%. The word of mouth value of telling a non-techie to go install such and such app and have it be just like their phone is huge. They don't have to figure out what a DMG, where it went after they installed it. Etc.