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0 pointslittlestymaar1y ago0 comments

Even when using Stripe (which is a premium payment service that's more expensive than most options) you'd be better off than the 15% from Apple as long as you sell for more than $2.5. And that's not even counting the up from cost that come with Apple (subscription + the need to buy a Mac).

How is chargeback being managed on Apple? I doubt they are swallowing the cost on their side, so I don't really see the difference between what'd get with a bank: you're losing the money anyway.

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zer00eyz1y ago

At 5 bucks a customer, you need 200k new ones a year to break a million bucks.

TO break even with apple you have about 80k a year all in cost to deal with all your refunds and charge backs.... after taxes, insurance and overhead that's 40-60k take home for a CS agent.

What is the charge back rate on digital goods? Im going to tell you that if your a small player it will be WAY higher than apple. Apple will cut a consumer off if they have a high refund rate, your CS agent will have no such insight.

%5-10 of your charges will just turn into refunds. Is that a process where you're killing license keys? Oh did you forget you now have infrastructure to run to issue and maintain said key? What is that going to cost you? Dont want to run like that... well ok then expect your return rate to go even higher. That discount CC processor is going to look at your refund and charge back rate and jack your fees up sky high (because that's the name of the game).

Once you get past a million bucks the open question is "do I do enough business to negotiate with apple". IN the case of a dry business oriented app, that has enough popularity to make that much, you might see apple willing to negotiate with you much sooner than a game dev who has sneaky buy options and huge charge back rates.

jokethrowaway1y ago

Chargebacks are a pain but are not that frequent. You need to make a way to refund your product easily discoverable because customers go unpunished.

You can use chargeback protection on stripe or use a different payment provider which absorb the 15$ fee for chargebacks

littlestymaarOP1y ago

> At 5 bucks a customer, you need 200k new ones a year to break a million bucks.

But at $5 per user Apple is already much more expensive below the million threshold. It gets worse after a million, but it's already costing you tens of thousands before that. And again, you are comparing with one of the most expensive option on the market!

> after taxes, insurance and overhead that's 40-60k take home for a CS agent

Which, almost anywhere in the world, is more than you need to hire someone full time to work on your customer support! And no, what Apple provides is definitely not superior to a full time consumer support person.

The “value” that you pay for when dealing with Apple is access to their walled-off user base.

> the open question is "do I do enough business to negotiate with apple

This isn't an “open question”, it's a closed one: Apple isn't going to talk to you unless they think not giving you special treatment would get them antitrust issues. In your case or mine, it's not gonna happen.

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