I would presume that includes paid and free developers; you have to have an Apple Developer account to sign Safari extensions, for instance, or to sign non-App Store Mac apps, neither of which require a paid Apple Developer account.

The point would still stand though that the total revenue from Apple Developer subscriptions would not be insignificant (perhaps insignificant to Apple’s overall revenue, but still enough to be a sizable startup’s budget on its own), which I should have noted in the original article.

> you have to have an Apple Developer account to sign Safari extensions, for instance, or to sign non-App Store Mac apps, neither of which require a paid Apple Developer account.

Their documentation suggests otherwise[1] (scroll down to “Benefits and Resources”). “Safari Extensions distribution” and “Software distribution outside the Mac App Store” are listed on the column of the 99 USD fee.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/

Interesting, this may have changed.

Just remembered that Safari now only lets you install extensions from the App Store, so that would actually make sense if a paid developer account is now required.

There’s yet another reason why Safari has so few extensions.

Also, to download Xcode, iirc

No. Xcode is needed for a lot of things like CLI tools, it's free.