Honestly I don’t think the 30% is that bad compared to setting up and managing payment processing yourself. What is difficult for small creators, though, is tha

Honestly I don’t think the 30% is that bad compared to setting up and managing payment processing yourself. What is difficult for small creators, though, is that Apple owns the customer relationship, not them. Because of the payment processing restrictions creators are unable to do things like offer discount codes or tiered subscription plans for specific kinds of users. It all has to go through what Apple is willing to enable. This is most stark with their recent announcement of supporting paid podcasts. Particularly because of the anonymization around sign-in with Apple, the podcaster doesn’t actually get to know who their subscribers are. Want to have special rewards or a subscriber only discord channel or forum? Too bad! If any of your biggest fans first started donating through Apple Podcasts you’ve got a big hassle in the way of verifying who they are. Got a weird customer service problem that you’d like to address with a personal touch or maybe offer some store credit or a special reward to make up for it? Once again, too bad. There is no capability to do that.