Long story short, you pay $100/year or $8.33/month for access to a suite of services that make apps frictionless for your users, and easier for you as a developer to offer high end features like authentication, notifications, and sync:
- App discovery, hosting, distribution, updates
- CloudKit, iCloud Documents, iCloud K/V Store
- Push Notifications
- Sign-in with Apple
- etc. (NFC is also in the list)
You do not have to pay anything if you do not want any of those services, however you will have to “refresh” your test app cert weekly or work around that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26399788
Long story short, you pay $100/year or $8.33/month for access to a suite of services that make apps frictionless for your users, and easier for you as a developer to offer high end features like authentication, notifications, and sync:
Details: https://help.apple.com/developer-account/#/dev21218dfd6You do not have to pay anything if you do not want any of those services, however you will have to “refresh” your test app cert weekly or work around that.