Apple wants 15% for sending users off-platform. Do the arithmetic first.Apple wants 15% for sending users off-platform. Do the arithmetic first.

Two things happened in August. Apple proposed charging US developers up to 15% on purchases made through external links, and in the EU the commission on link-outs dropped to 15% while in-app purchase moved to 26%. The European Commission welcomed the changes; Epic called the fees junk.

Clients read the headline as an escape hatch from Apple's cut. Before anyone commits engineering time, it is worth doing the arithmetic properly, because the answer is frequently not what they expect.

The number people compare against is wrong

The comparison is usually framed as 30% versus 15%, which makes link-outs look like a doubling of margin. It is not that, for three reasons.

• Most established subscription apps are already on the 15% small-business or second-year rate, so the gap is not 15 points.
• Payment processing outside the App Store is not free. Card fees, fraud tooling and currency conversion land somewhere between 2% and 4%.
• You inherit the work Apple was doing: receipts, refunds, chargebacks, tax registration in every jurisdiction you sell into, and the support load all of that generates.

Run those together and a 15% commission plus your own processing can land within a couple of points of what you were paying, while adding a permanent operational burden that did not exist before.

Where it genuinely pays

That is not an argument against link-outs. It is an argument for doing the sum on your actual numbers. The cases where it clearly wins:

• High average order value, where a fixed processing cost is a small fraction of the transaction.
• Existing web checkout, where the billing infrastructure and tax registrations are already built and staffed.
• Products where the subscription is sold elsewhere anyway and the app is one surface among several.

The cases where it usually loses: a small team, a low price point, and no existing billing operation. There the commission was buying you something real.

Apple's cut is a fee. It is also an outsourcing contract.

The conversion cost nobody models

The arithmetic above assumes the same number of people buy. They will not.

In-app purchase is one authentication away from complete. A link-out means leaving the app, loading a web page, and entering card details on a phone keyboard. Every step loses people. We have not seen a public figure for this that we would trust, so treat it as unknown rather than as zero - and structure any rollout so you can measure it against the in-app path rather than replacing it outright.

What we tell clients

Build the capability if the numbers support it, keep in-app purchase alongside it, and let users choose. The regulatory position is still moving on both sides of the Atlantic, and an architecture that supports exactly one payment route is an architecture that will need revisiting the next time a court or a regulator rules.