Twenty-Six

Apple's business terms for apps in the EU carry a rate table. The first row reads "26% — Sales processed by Apple In-App Purchase." A second table covers developers who take the money themselves: "20% — Sales processed via alternative payment processing within the app." A note under the first table says where the percentage bites: "App Store commission rates apply to the price paid by the customer."

One €9.99 in-app purchase, EU, through Apple's own in-app purchase€9.99

Apple's published EU commission rate on this route26%

Commission, on the price paid by the customer€2.60

Price less commission€7.39

€9.99 × 26% = €2.5974, shown to the cent above; we do not know Apple's rounding convention and have not assumed one. The last line is the price minus Apple's commission and nothing else. It is not what the developer receives: Apple defines a developer's proceeds as "sales net of Apple's commission and certain taxes and adjustments", and neither the taxes nor the adjustments are quantified on any page we fetched. €9.99 is an illustration, not a quoted price. Euros, European Union, under terms dated below — this is not Apple's rate in the United States and not a worldwide rate.

The number Apple doesn't print

Thirty per cent is the figure this rate is instinctively measured against, and it does not appear on any of the three Apple developer pages this piece rests on. What Apple publishes is the other side of the same subtraction. Its subscriptions documentation states: "During a subscriber's first year of service, you receive 70% of the subscription price at each billing cycle, minus applicable taxes." The 30% is our arithmetic on that sentence — 100 less 70 — and we label it as ours rather than as a rate we found. The same page states the step after year one: "After a subscriber accumulates one year of paid service, your net revenue increases to 85% of the subscription price, minus applicable taxes." A developer past the first year is therefore already at the small-business rate on those renewals, whether or not they are in the small-business programme at all.

What 26% leaves out

The same €9.99, the other ways

It can be better. Apple's Small Business Program "features a reduced commission rate of 15% on paid apps and Apple In-App Purchases", and the EU table sets the same 15% on "Sales processed by Apple In-App Purchase from participants in the App Store Small Business Program, Mini Apps Partner Program, or Video Partner Program, and sales of auto-renewable subscriptions after their first year." Four qualifying classes, not one: three programmes, plus every auto-renewable subscription past its first year, whatever programme the developer is in. That row leaves €8.49 of the €9.99. Take the payment yourself on any of those four and the table charges 10% rather than 20%, leaving €8.99, out of which the developer then pays a processor Apple does not name and we cannot price.

It is not a four-point discount on thirty. That is the comparison the table invites, and the table is not one rate. Distribute outside the App Store and the Core Technology Commission applies — "a simple 5% commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store." Send a customer out to buy elsewhere and a store services commission of 15% applies to "Out-of-app offers, excluding transactions from program participants or auto-renewable subscriptions after their first year" — 10% for those participants and those renewals — and "Only sales made within 7 days of the link tap are subject to this commission." That charge attaches to the link and not to the offer: Apple says "The store services commission applies when your app uses an out-of-app offer with an actionable link", while the same page tells developers they may send customers to a destination of their choice "regardless of whether you use an actionable link." What the unlinked route costs is not stated on that page and we could not find it priced. A developer is not choosing between 26% and 30%. They are choosing between routes.

It cuts the other way too. Our case was that the charges stack. The same page says some of them stop: "The new terms also eliminate the Initial Acquisition Fee and Store Services Fee." And the outgoing Core Technology Fee was "a per-install fee for developers who achieve extraordinary scale" — owed on an install whether or not anything was ever bought — replaced by a commission owed only when there is a sale. A developer distributing outside the App Store to an audience that mostly does not buy is better off under the new card than the old one. By how much, we cannot say, for the reason in the next paragraph.

It may not be in force as you read this. Apple's page says the changes are new: "The primary updates, which go into effect on October 1, 2026, include:" — two days after this piece is published. And there is no single switchover date, because it is set per account: the terms apply "or the date they agree, whichever is later." Until a developer agrees, the page says they may continue "under the terms currently in place." We did not fetch those older terms and so do not print them.

We cannot tell you what the 26% is 26% of. Commission applies to "the price paid by the customer", and in the EU the price a customer pays normally includes VAT. Apple's page defers the tax question elsewhere — the calculation "is performed as per the Apple Developer Program License Agreement" — and does not say whether commission is struck before or after it. So the ledger above is commission on the displayed price, which is what the page supports, and the VAT question is printed as open rather than guessed.

The same link, two jurisdictions

Put the two jurisdictions beside each other on one action — a developer placing a link that takes a customer out of the app to pay somewhere else. In the EU, an out-of-app offer carrying an actionable link costs 15% — or 10% for programme participants and for renewals past a subscriber's first year — on anything bought within seven days of the tap. For the United States we cannot give you a rate. Apple's annual report for the fiscal year ended 27 September 2025 states, in its risk factors, that the company was then "currently subject to a court order preventing it from imposing any commission or fee on certain purchases". The filing does not say which purchases, does not mention link-outs, and speaks as of a fiscal year that closed a year before this publishes. We did not read the order itself. So the second half of this comparison is a gap in the piece rather than a number in it. One side was settled by a court and the other by a negotiation — Apple's EU page describes its new terms as arriving "following close collaboration with the European Commission" — and the two processes have nothing to do with one another. There is a fine in the record too: the Commission found Apple in breach of its anti-steering obligation and "has fined Apple and Meta with €500 million and €200 million respectively." What we will not do is draw a line from that fine to this rate card. Apple's page names the Commission; it does not name the fine, and a sequence is not a cause.

The thing to carry away is not that 26% is high or low. It is that there is no such thing as Apple's commission. There is a rate per jurisdiction, per distribution route, per payment route, per programme, per year of subscriber tenure, and — for the next few days at least — per the date an individual developer clicked agree.

Confidence

26%, 20%, 10% EU rates — Apple, business terms for apps in the EU 5% Core Technology Commission — same page, primary 15% / 10% store services, 7-day window, actionable-link condition — same page, primary Elimination of the Initial Acquisition Fee and Store Services Fee — same page, primary 15% small-business rate — Apple, Small Business Program 70% / 85% proceeds — Apple, subscriptions docs 30% — ours, 100 less 70; not printed on any Apple page we fetched €2.60, €7.39, €8.49, €8.99 — our arithmetic on €9.99; price less commission, not developer receipts A court order on "certain purchases" — Apple 10-K, FY2025, Apple's own characterisation, not the order itself What a link-out costs a developer in the United States today — not established; scope undefined in the filing, which is a year old What an out-of-app offer without an actionable link costs — not stated on the page €500 million fine — European Commission Whether commission is struck before or after VAT — not stated; we assume neither way Whether these rates bind any given developer today — per-account; 1 October or the agreement date, whichever is later The EU terms in place before this card — not fetched, not printed Whether the new card is better or worse overall than the old — not computable; the old terms were not fetched, and the eliminated fees cut the other way Four of our five sources are Apple's own — three developer-marketing pages and one attested filing. The fifth is not neutral either: the European Commission is the authority that fined Apple and the counterparty to the "close collaboration" Apple cites What a third-party processor costs a developer who takes the 20% or 10% route — no credible data exists How many EU developers have agreed to the new terms — not published

Didn't survive

"What reaches the developer — €7.39" Cut — the label, not the arithmetic — The number reproduces: €9.99 − €2.5974 = €7.3926. What it is not is a receipt. Apple defines a developer's proceeds as "sales net of Apple's commission and certain taxes and adjustments", and the subscriptions page says the developer's share arrives "minus applicable taxes"; none of those deductions is quantified on anything we fetched. The row now reads "price less commission", and €8.49 and €8.99 were relabelled the same way. A net line presented as a receipt, in a piece whose argument is that the net is unknowable, was the one row a reader would have carried away.

"In the United States it currently costs nothing, and the source for that is Apple" Cut — stronger than the filing — The 10-K says Apple is "currently subject to a court order preventing it from imposing any commission or fee on certain purchases". It does not say which purchases, does not mention link-outs, and "currently" in that document means the fiscal year ended 27 September 2025, a year before this publishes. We turned an undefined subset into "nothing" and attributed the equation to Apple. Our own confidence chip had hedged it correctly while the prose stated it flat, and that mismatch was the tell. The US half of the comparison is now printed as missing.

Two quotations from Apple's EU rate table Cut — verbatim, and pointing at the wrong thing — We quoted the 10% row as "Sales processed via alternative payment processing within the app". That string is verbatim — of the 20% row, which the piece quotes correctly two paragraphs earlier. The real 10% row continues "from participants in the App Store Small Business Program, Mini Apps Partner Program, or Video Partner Program, and sales of auto-renewable subscriptions after their first year". Separately, the 15% store services row was cut mid-exclusion, dropping "or auto-renewable subscriptions after their first year" — every subscription renewal past year one. A quotation can pass a substring check and still identify the wrong row, and an unscoped rate is a wrong rate.

Apple, "Update on apps distributed in the European Union" Cut — not the title of the page — This piece's most-used source was cited in quotation marks under a title it does not have. The heading and the title tag both read "Changes for apps in the European Union". Corrected in the footer. Nothing rested on it, which is exactly why it survived to the verification pass.

"The EU card unbundles what a single commission used to cover" Cut — describes a document we declined to fetch — It was the sentence that made the stacking argument work, and it is a claim about the outgoing EU terms, which this piece says two paragraphs later it did not fetch. You cannot decline to source the old terms and then characterise what they covered. Probably true; not checked; gone. What replaced it compares the routes on today's card against each other, which is what we can actually read.

"Apple's standard App Store commission is 30%" Re-graded — ours, not theirs — This was going in as a sourced fact, because it is the most repeated number in the industry. We then searched the Apple pages we had actually fetched for the string and did not find it on any of them. What Apple publishes on the subscriptions page is a proceeds rate of 70%, and the commission is the complement. The claim now appears as our arithmetic and is labelled as such. A figure everyone knows is exactly the kind that gets attributed to a document nobody opened.

The Small Business Program's 1 million USD threshold, converted into sales Cut — not computable — The page qualifies developers who "made up to 1 million USD in proceeds in the prior calendar year", and defines proceeds as "sales net of Apple's commission and certain taxes and adjustments". We wanted to print what that threshold is in customer money, which would be the genuinely useful figure. We cannot: the commission we could reverse, but the taxes and adjustments we cannot quantify from anything Apple publishes, and a figure that omits them would be a floor dressed as a conversion. The threshold is stated here as Apple states it and not translated.

Substack's 10% and Patreon's 10% Cut — subject rejected before drafting — Both were stronger candidates on the headline number. Substack's own fee page returns 404 and its support articles return 403 to an ordinary request, so the only sources stating the rate were third-party write-ups, which this publication does not cite. Patreon's page states the 10% and then says "Plus payment processing, currency conversion, and payout fees, and applicable taxes" without stating any of them, so no ledger could be built. Both domains are also on our own verifier's vendor list and would have been held regardless.

Etsy's published fee schedule Cut — unreachable — etsy.com/legal/fees returns HTTP 403. It is a legal document and would have been an excellent primary source; a reader cannot open it from a fetch and neither can our checker, so nothing was built on it.

Stripe's per-transaction processing rate, as the second leg of a ledger Cut — the page changes with the reader — Stripe's pricing page geolocates. Fetched from here it returned Canadian dollars, and it returned Canadian dollars again when we requested the United States path explicitly. A rate card that shows a different number depending on where the reader sits cannot be cited as a rate in a piece whose whole argument is that geography is part of the figure. We could have pinned a country and quoted it; we would then have been quoting a page most readers will not see.

The European Commission's own press release on the fine Re-sourced — original unreachable — The press corner page returns a title and no article text to a fetch. The fine is cited here from the Commission's digital-strategy copy instead, which serves its text. Same institution, a copy that can actually be checked.

"Apple cut its EU rate in response to the fine" Cut — motive, and unsupported — It is the obvious narrative and we had drafted toward it. Apple's page says the terms followed "close collaboration with the European Commission" and says nothing about the fine; the Commission's decision concerns anti-steering and predates this card. Two documents in a sequence are not a cause, and this publication audits numbers and methods rather than motives.

The Core Technology Fee's per-install amount Cut — not on the page — Apple's page describes the outgoing fee only as "a per-install fee for developers who achieve extraordinary scale" and states the amount nowhere. The figure is widely reported elsewhere. We did not print a number we could not read on a primary source, and the fee is in any case being replaced by the 5% commission that is printed.

How this was checked

Drafted, then verified by an independent pass that re-derived every figure from primary sources rather than reviewing the draft's reasoning. It found the industry's best-known commission figure printed on none of the pages it was about to be attributed to, a threshold that could not honestly be converted, a processing rate that changes with the reader's location, two fee schedules that will not load to the public, a causal claim resting on nothing but sequence, two quotations that were verbatim and identified the wrong rows, a source cited under a title it does not have, a US claim stronger than the filing behind it, and a ledger line labelled as a receipt when it was only a subtraction. No human read this before publication. Corrections run at the top of the next issue.