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Why is charging a flat fee never an option? Just take $200 and let me do my thing. Taking any % of my income on the regular as a kind of existence tax is detrim

Why is charging a flat fee never an option? Just take $200 and let me do my thing. Taking any % of my income on the regular as a kind of existence tax is detrimental for the ecosystem.

Yeroc 5y ago
There are incremental costs involved in bandwidth, if nothing else, to actually distribute your application so it makes sense it's not a simple flat fee.
- otrahuevada 5y ago
  I've actually never looked at what the bandwidth and storage costs for my apps could be. But also, they could easily be taken out of the equation by letting me pay for that separately? Inclusion in the mandatory single point of failure that is the app stores _by itself_ should not demand a hefty, ongoing tax
CodesInChaos 5y ago
1. Some of their costs scale with the number of purchases or revenue made through the shop (traffic, support, payment processing fees) 2. Fixed costs, like development effort, need to be distributed across their customers. Fixed fees will be negligible for big customers and unaffordable for small customers. 3. They're gatekeepers for these devices. If you want your app on a device they can control you need to pay their fees. So as long as the fees are not big enough to deter a developer from publishing their app for that device, they can charge whatever they want. I think revenue sharing is the best pricing model for an app store, but without abusing the gatekeeper status the fees would likely be significantly lower.
- ramesh1994 5y ago
  While I do agree with what you've said, I think they should be able to price these into a bill that they can send the app developers monthly. They have shown competency in running the pricing on AWS to such great margins and few people seem to complain about pricing. Perhaps it is a combination of the sentiment that they are owed a percentage of your income and it being such a large number (20-30%) frustrates the developers.
DoctorOW 5y ago
I've never developed for Amazon, but on Apple it's both. $99/year + 30%
Siira 5y ago
You are asking the thieves to just take $200 when they can take more? Good dreams.

Why is charging a flat fee never an option? Just take $200 and let me do my thing. Taking any % of my income on the regular as a kind of existence tax is detrimental for the ecosystem.

Yeroc 5y ago

There are incremental costs involved in bandwidth, if nothing else, to actually distribute your application so it makes sense it's not a simple flat fee.

otrahuevada 5y ago
I've actually never looked at what the bandwidth and storage costs for my apps could be. But also, they could easily be taken out of the equation by letting me pay for that separately? Inclusion in the mandatory single point of failure that is the app stores _by itself_ should not demand a hefty, ongoing tax

CodesInChaos 5y ago

1. Some of their costs scale with the number of purchases or revenue made through the shop (traffic, support, payment processing fees) 2. Fixed costs, like development effort, need to be distributed across their customers. Fixed fees will be negligible for big customers and unaffordable for small customers. 3. They're gatekeepers for these devices. If you want your app on a device they can control you need to pay their fees. So as long as the fees are not big enough to deter a developer from publishing their app for that device, they can charge whatever they want. I think revenue sharing is the best pricing model for an app store, but without abusing the gatekeeper status the fees would likely be significantly lower.

ramesh1994 5y ago
While I do agree with what you've said, I think they should be able to price these into a bill that they can send the app developers monthly. They have shown competency in running the pricing on AWS to such great margins and few people seem to complain about pricing. Perhaps it is a combination of the sentiment that they are owed a percentage of your income and it being such a large number (20-30%) frustrates the developers.

DoctorOW 5y ago

I've never developed for Amazon, but on Apple it's both. $99/year + 30%

Siira 5y ago

You are asking the thieves to just take $200 when they can take more? Good dreams.