1) One certainly can do this cheaper. But I’m going to hazard a guess (sight unseen) that bandcamp doesn’t provide as much for that 15%. The original point wasn’t “can you do it cheaper”, it was “do you get a desirable amount of value for the 30%”. I’m a consultant, and there are cheaper options than me. I feel I provide good value for the money, and I guess the fact that I have customers says the market agrees, but that doesn’t mean that some less expensive competitor isn’t a perfectly fine option. It means that the market says I am worth X so I can charge X... Nothing more.
2) The $99 argument is interesting. From my persepective: Enterprise tools cost a lot and 99$ yearly is insanely reasonable. I’d guess that it basically just covers the cost to them of supporting the devs and maintaining the interface to the dev side of security infrastructure. What I can say with some confidence is that it can’t cover even a fraction of the cost of creating and maintaining Xcode. I think the $99 is a way to recover some cost, and create a barrier to entry that makes sure that people who join are at least a tiny bit somewhat serious.
(oh, and I love your username... awesomeness)
Bandcamp does all of this and more, including selling physical merchandise, and only takes 15% of the sale price for digital goods, and 10% for physical merchandise.
> Oh, and the full updated toolchain and dev environments..
Developers have privilege of paying Apple $99 each year to develop and release iOS and macOS software.