> - Credit card processing fees Around 1.5%. Probably even cheaper for the big fish. > - Hosting the content (yes minimal but can't be ignored) S3 charges $0

> - Credit card processing fees Around 1.5%. Probably even cheaper for the big fish. > - Hosting the content (yes minimal but can't be ignored) S3 charges $0.0007/GB and $0.00000004/request for downloads as their baseline. Assuming a typical app size of ~50MB, each download would cost $0.00003504. Updates would be even cheaper, since they are usually tiny delta packages. > - Approval process (the people) A problem that they imposed in the first place. > - "Editors" that create the curated lists every day See above. > - Developer support hours (technically you get with the yearly subscription but I doubt that actually covers the cost of those hours). Then charge the actual cost for support, or improve the documentation? It doesn't exactly seem fair to make the competent developers subsidize the people who bog down the support department. (Or, if it's actually common to use these, to use their monopoly to force devs to use a platform so awful that they actually need to call the support.) > - The engineers building the developer tools (Xcode, the developer portal, TestFlight, etc) Which are self-imposed problems and/or inferior to free third-party tools.