13 ms·

>Access to customer data See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for upsells, offers and product news. As a seller, you understandably want tha

by jasode 5y ago

>Access to customer data See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for upsells, offers and product news. As a seller, you understandably want that valuable buyer info. But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam. If anyone thinks that Paddle's 10% fee might mean the final in-app purchase price would be lower which would make it worth the tradeoff to give my data, I'm not so sure about that since an interpretation of the ruling still gives Apple the right to get 30% via Paddle: https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/14/apple-can-still-charge-its-app-store-30-fee-even-after-epic-ruling-analysts-say/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/14/apple-can-still-charge-its-ap... If anyone thinks getting a % of someone else's payment stream is unusual, consider how the "360" record label deals[1] with musicians are structured. All the musician's revenue (CDs, streaming, t-shirts) regardless of payment method (box office or website selling tshirts) is split with the record label. Why is that "unfair" situation even possible?!? Because the musician signed a contract agreeing to the revenue split. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360_deal

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> …deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy… Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs? As a consumer, I sure hope apple forces some kind of privacy standards compliance.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  > Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs? I read through the decision when it first came down, and while Apple was blocked from restricting third-party payment systems, there was no language preventing Apple from mandating their own payment system alongside third-party options. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple dropped their 30% cut for their own system, but kept a 30% commission for third-party systems.
  - gondo 5y ago
    How would Apple know the volume charged via 3rd party systems?
polote 5y ago
> But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam You make it seems like, this is an issue. But every service that you use today has your email, Amazon, your ISP, Apple, .. everyone. If you don't want to receive email, use a secondary email to subscribe to services and you will not be annoyed with unsolicited emails
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Yeah, or we could just keep things exactly the way they are and not fuck with it because it's actually better for me as a consumer.
  - lolpython 5y ago
    Paying 30 percent extra is not unilaterally better for the consumer.
    - dkonofalski 5y ago
      It is if I get all the benefits of paying what that 30% covers.
- nolok 5y ago
  Nope, to take a current exemple which many people loathe for one reason or another, even EPIC Games Store does not transfer your email to the seller by default, and the checkbox do to do so in checkout is left unchecked by default.
bilekas 5y ago
I'm also not comfortable about the sharing of my email AND other data. I like using REvolut/Apple pay for this very reasons. Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ? Seems they've just branded off the back of the Epic // Apple ruling ?
- chipgap98 5y ago
  > Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ? Paddle is an established company, they've just added a new mobile checkout feature.
  - bilekas 5y ago
    Okay fair enough, so it still doesn't seem that newsworthy imo as they will all be doing the same if not already
NamTaf 5y ago
Precisely. I saw that and was instantly glad Apple is a middleman for that particular point. For all their criticisms, they seem to be one of the companies that gets that. If it's a service I use enough to possibly consider an upsell opportunity, I'll be aware of that opportunity through organically discovering it during my use of the service or through broader community discussion regarding the service. In all other cases, I don't want unsolicited contact.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Paddle et al. can implement an email forwarder so the emails go to user3492@proxy.paddle.com if privacy is truly a concern. Plus paddle has arguably much less info on yourself to be worried. I don't think the situation with record labels is even remotely comparable -- apple & google do very little to help devs.
jonplackett 5y ago
> But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam. I thought the same initially - but come on, this is the situation when you buy anything from anywhere else except the AppStore and we all get on with it just fine. You just decide if you trust the seller or not and block their emails if they're annoying.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Saying that - I just received an email from Apple reminding me that two of my subscriptions are coming up in a month and letting me know i could cancel them before that - so there are big benefits to having someone in your corner, in the middle.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Do you hate your subscriptions that much? And love Apple like your mother? This is like Jeff Bezos is sending you letters asking which small business you'd like to deny rent money to this month. He's cackling in the background knowing you're paying him and that it makes his ecosystem stronger to rope everyone into it and pit them all in evolutionary battles to the death.
    - moate 5y ago
      No it isn't. It's like Apple asking you if you want to keep paying for a service you voluntarily signed yourself up for. You can set your own calendar reminders about subscriptions you may not want in perpetuity, but it's entirely on the small business to keep me as a customer. Let's not pretend that the "poor small guys" don't sometimes use subscription models with automatic renewal specifically because they're hoping people will keep paying them after the product is no longer useful because they forget to cancel their service. This is a known dark pattern I've seen complained about everywhere (including here).
    - dang 5y ago
      Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, fulminating, and posting flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do this sort of thing and you do it a lot. That's not cool. I don't want to ban you but we've had to ask you this many times already, and at some point the slack is going to run out. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Spam? Who cares outlook will learn to ditch that in a few weeks. Apple is just another parasite middle man and the defenders are sounding like brainwashed fan boys.
- threeseed 5y ago
  After I supported an Indiegogo/Kickstarter campaign somehow my email has been sold on to other campaigns. I now get hundreds of emails a year promoting other campaigns. None of which Outlook can block since it’s from unique companies and all of which I have to manually unsubscribe from. That kind of spam is insidious and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what companies do with your data.
  - oauea 5y ago
    That is already illegal. Report the companies. Apple has absolutely nothing to do with this.
    - bathtub365 5y ago
      You can engage in transactions using their proxy service so the company the company doesn’t get your real email address. “Report the companies” to who? Where? I’d rather not be in that situation in the first place, it’s a huge waste of my time.
      - oauea 5y ago
        So you'd really rather hide behind Apple's goodwill instead of simply having the government regulate things, as they're already doing? Simply contact the relevant watchdog in your country.
        bathtub365 5y ago
        Why would I let someone continuously dump garbage into my life while I wait for a government regulator to respond to my complaint? I would rather not have the problem in the first place.
pimterry 5y ago
> Access to customer data See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for upsells, offers and product news. It looks like they've updated the text since this comment. That bullet point now says: > Access to customer email for support > See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for billing support. Harvesting emails from purchases for pure marketing is GDPR-dubious at best, and Paddle's main market is the EU (because it handles EU VAT in a way that Stripe cannot), so I suspect they're backing away from any implication that you could ever actually send marketing to IAP customers legally.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  The subscription section also seems wrong. Apple has subscription support. I can start and end my subscriptions at any time.
alin23 5y ago
I’m using Paddle for my MacOS app, Lunar (https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi) and in my opinion they are serious enough about privacy. For example when you buy a license you are by default opted-out of marketing or update emails [0] And the upsell feature isn’t functional by default for everyone, you need to contact them to discuss a “moving upmarket” strategy. [1] [0] https://cln.sh/llVLV2 https://cln.sh/llVLV2 [1] https://cln.sh/6lqYc1 https://cln.sh/6lqYc1
- drcongo 5y ago
  I used Paddle once, many years ago, with a unique "+" address, and still get spam to that address to this day. These days I don't buy software if Paddle is the only option. I always thought the name Paddle was something to do with the flood of spam you can expect.
  - alin23 5y ago
    I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through. Until now, I’ve used Stripe, Paypal, Paddle and some local Romanian company and all of them provided me the email of the customer where it was available. It’s up to the seller to abide by the rules, the platform isn’t at fault here.
    - admax88qqq 5y ago
      The payment processor could have insulated your data. But with paddle it sounds like sharing your data with the vendor is one of their selling points
    - drcongo 5y ago
      Unrelated spam from thousands of "companies". > I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through. Except, of course, it has NEVER happened with the thousands of apps I've bought through Apple's official stores. Not once.
habitue 5y ago
There's a world where I imagine apple tries to compete here, and says "yes, you pay a bit more through apple, but we don't give away your email address" etc, etc. Consumers could vote with their wallet what they care about. In practice, my bet is that Apple uses their opaque app approval process and ability to change the rules at any time to make it arbitrarily hard for apps that use paddle to stay in the app store.
- rsanek 5y ago
  I don't know if I'd characterize a price that's 10-25% more expensive than the alternative as just "a bit more."
  - habitue 5y ago
    Right, I mean you know Apple could make the case to consumers that the premium is worth it, or maybe drop the price a bit. You know, normal competition things. I guess my point is that I doubt they'll do anything of the sort.
dkonofalski 5y ago
Additionally, Paddle is completely ignoring that Apple's 30% doesn't only include payments. It includes everything required to make those in-app purchases function - hosting, downloads, updates, management, reviews, localization, etc. All this would mean is that Apple will get to collect that money from 2 sources instead of one which complicates the situation for both developers and for customers. Until a judge rules that Apple doesn't have control over its own App Store (which the Epic ruling explicitly reaffirmed that it does), this is only going to get silly and bloated.
- sneak 5y ago
  The hosting, downloads, updates, reviews are all covered already by the $99/yr developer fee, because this is what is charged for that to free apps without IAPs. Apple is just using their anticompetitive stance to charge 10x more than the standard industry rate for payment card processing.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    No it's not... In-app purchases also require hosting, download, and update services. The apps themselves do but the purchases do also. The $99/yr only covers the license to develop an app.

by jasode 5y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> …deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy… Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs? As a consumer, I sure hope apple forces some kind of privacy standards compliance.

ascagnel_ 5y ago
> Can apple still dictate things about the payment systems, even if they can’t force you to use theirs? I read through the decision when it first came down, and while Apple was blocked from restricting third-party payment systems, there was no language preventing Apple from mandating their own payment system alongside third-party options. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple dropped their 30% cut for their own system, but kept a 30% commission for third-party systems.
- gondo 5y ago
  How would Apple know the volume charged via 3rd party systems?

polote 5y ago

> But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam You make it seems like, this is an issue. But every service that you use today has your email, Amazon, your ISP, Apple, .. everyone. If you don't want to receive email, use a secondary email to subscribe to services and you will not be annoyed with unsolicited emails

meepmorp 5y ago
Yeah, or we could just keep things exactly the way they are and not fuck with it because it's actually better for me as a consumer.
- lolpython 5y ago
  Paying 30 percent extra is not unilaterally better for the consumer.
  - dkonofalski 5y ago
    It is if I get all the benefits of paying what that 30% covers.
nolok 5y ago
Nope, to take a current exemple which many people loathe for one reason or another, even EPIC Games Store does not transfer your email to the seller by default, and the checkbox do to do so in checkout is left unchecked by default.

bilekas 5y ago

I'm also not comfortable about the sharing of my email AND other data. I like using REvolut/Apple pay for this very reasons. Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ? Seems they've just branded off the back of the Epic // Apple ruling ?

chipgap98 5y ago
> Also I don't understand why this is some new kind of company, isn't this just another payment gateway like any other ? Paddle is an established company, they've just added a new mobile checkout feature.
- bilekas 5y ago
  Okay fair enough, so it still doesn't seem that newsworthy imo as they will all be doing the same if not already

NamTaf 5y ago

Precisely. I saw that and was instantly glad Apple is a middleman for that particular point. For all their criticisms, they seem to be one of the companies that gets that. If it's a service I use enough to possibly consider an upsell opportunity, I'll be aware of that opportunity through organically discovering it during my use of the service or through broader community discussion regarding the service. In all other cases, I don't want unsolicited contact.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Paddle et al. can implement an email forwarder so the emails go to user3492@proxy.paddle.com if privacy is truly a concern. Plus paddle has arguably much less info on yourself to be worried. I don't think the situation with record labels is even remotely comparable -- apple & google do very little to help devs.

jonplackett 5y ago

> But as a customer, I'd deliberately avoid Paddle to keep my privacy and avoid spam. I thought the same initially - but come on, this is the situation when you buy anything from anywhere else except the AppStore and we all get on with it just fine. You just decide if you trust the seller or not and block their emails if they're annoying.

jonplackett 5y ago
Saying that - I just received an email from Apple reminding me that two of my subscriptions are coming up in a month and letting me know i could cancel them before that - so there are big benefits to having someone in your corner, in the middle.
- echelon 5y ago
  Do you hate your subscriptions that much? And love Apple like your mother? This is like Jeff Bezos is sending you letters asking which small business you'd like to deny rent money to this month. He's cackling in the background knowing you're paying him and that it makes his ecosystem stronger to rope everyone into it and pit them all in evolutionary battles to the death.
  - moate 5y ago
    No it isn't. It's like Apple asking you if you want to keep paying for a service you voluntarily signed yourself up for. You can set your own calendar reminders about subscriptions you may not want in perpetuity, but it's entirely on the small business to keep me as a customer. Let's not pretend that the "poor small guys" don't sometimes use subscription models with automatic renewal specifically because they're hoping people will keep paying them after the product is no longer useful because they forget to cancel their service. This is a known dark pattern I've seen complained about everywhere (including here).
  - dang 5y ago
    Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, fulminating, and posting flamewar comments to HN? We ban accounts that do this sort of thing and you do it a lot. That's not cool. I don't want to ban you but we've had to ask you this many times already, and at some point the slack is going to run out. Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Spam? Who cares outlook will learn to ditch that in a few weeks. Apple is just another parasite middle man and the defenders are sounding like brainwashed fan boys.

threeseed 5y ago
After I supported an Indiegogo/Kickstarter campaign somehow my email has been sold on to other campaigns. I now get hundreds of emails a year promoting other campaigns. None of which Outlook can block since it’s from unique companies and all of which I have to manually unsubscribe from. That kind of spam is insidious and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what companies do with your data.
- oauea 5y ago
  That is already illegal. Report the companies. Apple has absolutely nothing to do with this.
  - bathtub365 5y ago
    You can engage in transactions using their proxy service so the company the company doesn’t get your real email address. “Report the companies” to who? Where? I’d rather not be in that situation in the first place, it’s a huge waste of my time.
    - oauea 5y ago
      So you'd really rather hide behind Apple's goodwill instead of simply having the government regulate things, as they're already doing? Simply contact the relevant watchdog in your country.
      - bathtub365 5y ago
        Why would I let someone continuously dump garbage into my life while I wait for a government regulator to respond to my complaint? I would rather not have the problem in the first place.

pimterry 5y ago

> Access to customer data See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for upsells, offers and product news. It looks like they've updated the text since this comment. That bullet point now says: > Access to customer email for support > See customers’ emails, so you can communicate with them for billing support. Harvesting emails from purchases for pure marketing is GDPR-dubious at best, and Paddle's main market is the EU (because it handles EU VAT in a way that Stripe cannot), so I suspect they're backing away from any implication that you could ever actually send marketing to IAP customers legally.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
The subscription section also seems wrong. Apple has subscription support. I can start and end my subscriptions at any time.

alin23 5y ago

I’m using Paddle for my MacOS app, Lunar (https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi) and in my opinion they are serious enough about privacy. For example when you buy a license you are by default opted-out of marketing or update emails [0] And the upsell feature isn’t functional by default for everyone, you need to contact them to discuss a “moving upmarket” strategy. [1] [0] https://cln.sh/llVLV2 https://cln.sh/llVLV2 [1] https://cln.sh/6lqYc1 https://cln.sh/6lqYc1

drcongo 5y ago
I used Paddle once, many years ago, with a unique "+" address, and still get spam to that address to this day. These days I don't buy software if Paddle is the only option. I always thought the name Paddle was something to do with the flood of spam you can expect.
- alin23 5y ago
  I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through. Until now, I’ve used Stripe, Paypal, Paddle and some local Romanian company and all of them provided me the email of the customer where it was available. It’s up to the seller to abide by the rules, the platform isn’t at fault here.
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    The payment processor could have insulated your data. But with paddle it sounds like sharing your data with the vendor is one of their selling points
  - drcongo 5y ago
    Unrelated spam from thousands of "companies". > I’d say that’s just a bad seller who would have spammed you no matter what payment processor you would have gone through. Except, of course, it has NEVER happened with the thousands of apps I've bought through Apple's official stores. Not once.

habitue 5y ago

There's a world where I imagine apple tries to compete here, and says "yes, you pay a bit more through apple, but we don't give away your email address" etc, etc. Consumers could vote with their wallet what they care about. In practice, my bet is that Apple uses their opaque app approval process and ability to change the rules at any time to make it arbitrarily hard for apps that use paddle to stay in the app store.

rsanek 5y ago
I don't know if I'd characterize a price that's 10-25% more expensive than the alternative as just "a bit more."
- habitue 5y ago
  Right, I mean you know Apple could make the case to consumers that the premium is worth it, or maybe drop the price a bit. You know, normal competition things. I guess my point is that I doubt they'll do anything of the sort.

dkonofalski 5y ago

Additionally, Paddle is completely ignoring that Apple's 30% doesn't only include payments. It includes everything required to make those in-app purchases function - hosting, downloads, updates, management, reviews, localization, etc. All this would mean is that Apple will get to collect that money from 2 sources instead of one which complicates the situation for both developers and for customers. Until a judge rules that Apple doesn't have control over its own App Store (which the Epic ruling explicitly reaffirmed that it does), this is only going to get silly and bloated.

sneak 5y ago
The hosting, downloads, updates, reviews are all covered already by the $99/yr developer fee, because this is what is charged for that to free apps without IAPs. Apple is just using their anticompetitive stance to charge 10x more than the standard industry rate for payment card processing.
- dkonofalski 5y ago
  No it's not... In-app purchases also require hosting, download, and update services. The apps themselves do but the purchases do also. The $99/yr only covers the license to develop an app.