> unless this is waived for these kinds of apps, I couldn’t tell when trying to dig up an answer

Mostly, no.

"You can request to have the annual Apple Developer Program membership fee waived if you’re a nonprofit organization, accredited educational institution, or government entity that will distribute only free apps on the App Store and is based in an eligible country."

"Fee waivers are not available for: Individuals and sole proprietors/single person businesses"

https://developer.apple.com/support/membership-fee-waiver/

That is definitely the reason I haven't tried to develop anything for the Apple ecosystem even though I've used it for more than a decade. $100 a year is wasted money for hobby projects which may not even be published in an app store.

I dunno, I think it’s both. I’ve paid the $100 a year fee for over a decade, even though I don’t have anything in the App Store right now. For me, it’s worth it for access to the betas and to be able to self-sign and notarize stuff on GitHub.

So I already pay the $100 a year. But there is a browser extension I help maintain that has a very limited audience (it is essentially an internal tool, though it is in the Chrome and Edge stores). I would like to bring it to macOS/Safari and started the process of doing it. But there are so many hoops, it will vastly change the build pipeline (I’ll literally have to package every single update differently than the other platforms), and the process is so convoluted that honestly, I’ve given up for now. Bear in mind, I’d be the primary user of said extension and even for me, I can’t make the internal argument to waste time doing it over just using Chrome or Edge when I need that feature.

Having said all that, I should go ahead and port it to Firefox. That at least is a lot more straightforward.

Yeah. The $99/year is big enough to pretty much block out all hobby devs and open-source projects, so what's left are generally commercial and closed-source. Apple says that they do their own vetting of extensions, but I don't trust Apple to prevent extensions from reading my browsing history, especially considering spyware extensions like Honey are served on the App Store without warning.

> especially considering spyware extensions like Honey are served on the App Store without warning.

You have to explicitly grant permissions as a user for safari extensions.

Yes but every extension that does anything remotely interesting needs access to "your entire browsing history," which is a comment much scarier than it usually is. The truth is that it is impossible for a computer to distinguish malicious javascript from useful javascript, meaning all trust and verification needs to come from the user.

I suspect that extensions on the App Store that are popular make more money compared to being, well, free on Chrome web store. Or, developers are pricing their extensions to recoup costs on dev program costs.