Set up CC processing on the web:
How much are you going to pay stripe? 2.9% + 30¢ ... that means you have to charge 10 bucks to get down to a 6% transaction fee. Quite the price floor and an interesting cap on your pricing model!
What does managing chargebacks cost you? The moment your taking money your going to hire in customer service, or spend time dealing with CS. What happens when you get a chargeback, or do a refund? Most of the time you loose money (processing fees etc)
If your under a million bucks a year apple is 15%. If you're building a low price app or a value add app, odds are that apple is going to be a far better deal for you than doing it on your own.
Chargebacks = customer support. I agree with that, but if you have a B2C business which has any non-trivial revenue (OP is talking about word doc apps, so we’re obviously not talking about indie $2 side project apps), then you would already have CS anyway. I fully understand there is an opportunity cost with any service and where those costs get realized, but your examples don’t seem like a slam dunk in apple’s favor.
Would you? Because I would argue that CC processing is the point where you NEED near real time CS. Before that handling customer issues can be done better through forums, and you're going to get a lot of self service support from those.
>> (OP is talking about word doc apps, so we’re obviously not talking about indie $2 side project apps)
Your competing with free, libra office, Zoho writer (shockingly popular)... I would not know how to price the product to compete... 2 bucks a month as a trial? Would I pay 10 bucks a year if you were great? IF you got said productivity app past 100k users, getting to a million isnt a stretch (you have velocity and popularity).
Unless your doing something really slimy, your going to be able to get a better rate out of apple if you ask your rep.
Everybody pays for stuff online
How is chargeback being managed on Apple? I doubt they are swallowing the cost on their side, so I don't really see the difference between what'd get with a bank: you're losing the money anyway.
TO break even with apple you have about 80k a year all in cost to deal with all your refunds and charge backs.... after taxes, insurance and overhead that's 40-60k take home for a CS agent.
What is the charge back rate on digital goods? Im going to tell you that if your a small player it will be WAY higher than apple. Apple will cut a consumer off if they have a high refund rate, your CS agent will have no such insight.
%5-10 of your charges will just turn into refunds. Is that a process where you're killing license keys? Oh did you forget you now have infrastructure to run to issue and maintain said key? What is that going to cost you? Dont want to run like that... well ok then expect your return rate to go even higher. That discount CC processor is going to look at your refund and charge back rate and jack your fees up sky high (because that's the name of the game).
Once you get past a million bucks the open question is "do I do enough business to negotiate with apple". IN the case of a dry business oriented app, that has enough popularity to make that much, you might see apple willing to negotiate with you much sooner than a game dev who has sneaky buy options and huge charge back rates.
You can use chargeback protection on stripe or use a different payment provider which absorb the 15$ fee for chargebacks
But at $5 per user Apple is already much more expensive below the million threshold. It gets worse after a million, but it's already costing you tens of thousands before that. And again, you are comparing with one of the most expensive option on the market!
> after taxes, insurance and overhead that's 40-60k take home for a CS agent
Which, almost anywhere in the world, is more than you need to hire someone full time to work on your customer support! And no, what Apple provides is definitely not superior to a full time consumer support person.
The “value” that you pay for when dealing with Apple is access to their walled-off user base.
> the open question is "do I do enough business to negotiate with apple
This isn't an “open question”, it's a closed one: Apple isn't going to talk to you unless they think not giving you special treatment would get them antitrust issues. In your case or mine, it's not gonna happen.
?
Your math seems to show the exact opposite.
And once your rate goes to 30%, does it stay there the following year, or does the whole system reset to zero each year?
Subscriptions are 15% for renewals (and maybe for all subs).
If your pulling in more than a few million a year from apple, and your not "gaming" or gaming the system I hear they are fairly open to negotiate. YMMV
You’d owe the few extra cents.
You stay at 30% if annual proceeds continue to hit $1M/year. If not, you requalify for 15%.
How do you calculate a price for not being able to release your main product? Usually without clear indications of what exact interpretation of a rule you are breaking...
We've had delays of a week because of things like we mentioned "Android" in an integration setting that had been there for years.
You just have to open your source, that part which depends on Qt. It's not a real problem. But get a commercial license anyway, the cost is small compared to the other costs of developing your program, and you want to be friends with them.
(There's someone on HN who lives on a single-line modification of an open source program. Trust me, source availability of the source code of your client app won't really make a difference.)
Now I want to know more about this :-)
Using a shared object/DLL is the traditional way of doing so, but you can also accomplish this by providing the object files for your application to allow users to link their own substitutions statically.
The FSF explicitly permits this as documented here:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LGPLStaticVsDyn...
The only Java desktop app I've ever used (on any platform) without frustration was Slay the Spire, and it only passes because it's a game and doesn't require desktop integration of any kind.
I use JDownloader sometimes, it's totally fine. Weka is bad, but not worse than other academic apps.
[1] Yes, one can use Qt for commercial software without buying a license (as long as it is dynamically linked), but their marketing does everything it can to hide that fact. Also, the newer additions to Qt do not fall in this category – for those, you have to pay.
Here are the most commonly used options:
- Go LGPL. Sure, you will need to ship binaries and libs, but there are tools within the SDK that do this automatically for you (windeployqt, macdeployqt, etc.). And as others have stated, it is a problem that was solved years ago.
- Go Commercial to link statically. If you are a single developer, there is an annual license available for $499 (up to $100k yearly revenue).
It might not be worth the price, but that is hardly ridiculous. It is quite believable to get a 4% productivity improvement from appropriate tooling. You need to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine the answer to that question.
I think less than 1% of the users use it on mobile, but it's designed as a mobile interface.
To scroll you need to click and drag, or you need to click 5px buttons. Regular mouse scroll doesn't work.
If you're doing a GUI, you have no reason to be doing canvas manually.
Notarization is supposed to deter malware by a combination of static/dynamic analysis and attaching some real-world legal entity to any signed binary so law enforcement can follow up on if malicious activity is happening.
Analysis is not bulletproof and can be worked around.
The legal entity requirement is also trivial to nullify. At least in the UK, the company registration authority charges a nominal fee (payable by credit card - stolen if necessary) and puts you on the company register. Dun & Bradstreet scrapes that and that's how you get the DUNS number necessary to register for an Apple dev account. All of this is trivial to get through if you don't mind breaking the law and making up a few fake documents and providing a stolen CC (and assuming you're already planning to break the law by distributing malware, this is not a problem).
Finally, even if the "legal entity" bit was bulletproof, law enforcement just doesn't give a shit about the vast majority of online crime anyway.
All of these requirements are just a way to lock down access to the walled garden and put as many roadblocks to laymen trying to make their own software (in favor of big corps) masquerading as security theatre.
Firstly, stolen CCs tend to get reported especially if you make a big purchase. If you use a stolen CC to buy a developer certificate then it's going to get revoked the moment the real owner notices, and then your apps will be killed remotely by Apple before they've even been detected as malicious.
Still, the big win of notarization is that Apple can track down variants of your malware once it's identified and take them all out simultaneously. They keep copies of every program running on a Mac, so they can do clustering analysis server side. On Windows there's no equivalent of notarization, but the same task is necessary because otherwise malware authors can just spin endless minor variants that escape hash based detection, so virus scanners have to try and heuristically identify variants client side. This is not only a horrific resource burn but also requires the signatures to be pushed out to the clients where malware authors can observe them and immediately figure out how they're being spotted. Notarization is a far more effective approach. It's like the shift from Thunderbird doing spam filtering all on its own using hard-coded rules, to Gmail style server side spam filtering.
> All of these requirements are just a way to lock down access to the walled garden
I've been hearing this for over a decade now. In the beginning I believed it, but it's been a long time and Apple have never made macOS a walled garden like iOS is. There's no sign they're going to do it either. After all, at least some people have to be able to write new apps!
> analysis server side.
Are you sure about this ? I did not give apple permission to keep a copy of my software that I am writing.
https://developer.apple.com/support/terms/apple-developer-pr...
Section 5.3: "By uploading Your Application to Apple for this digital notary service, You agree that Apple may perform such security checks on Your Application for purposes of detecting malware or other harmful or suspicious code or components, and You agree that Apple may retain and use Your Application for subsequent security checks for the same purposes."
That's not realistic for Apple users who are used to ergonomic software. It's not technically required to notarize, but practically speaking, it is.
Apps like that get made anyway but as it stands at least there’s a healthy crop of smaller/indie native alternatives which often best the behemoths in UI/UX. That would likely disappear with the addition of a standardized UI API, as it would probably also come with the abandonment of the old specialized APIs.
I'm old enough to remember when buying development tooling for DOS or Windows was $$$$$$
Today Apple is taking percentage of every dollar made from application developers who participate in their App store and they are making it increasingly difficult to avoid this with every release. IMHO, they are making far more dollars today than they ever did selling development hardware and SDK licenses.
The whole thing is like an intentional vicious circle. People buy the systems because certain applications are available on them (or rather because that's what everyone does), and the application manufacturers support the systems where the most customers are expected. But if one takes an impartial look at which applications or functions are really needed for a company, there are certainly alternatives.
Unfortunately, the open source community sabotages itself, e.g. by constantly changing the ABI of essential functions and thus undermining the portability of non-open source applications (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624).
My statement was: Apparently, people prefer to buy expensive devices that eavesdrop and patronize them. As long as this continues and people don't run away from these manufacturers, they will continue with the trend and patronize people even more.
If your work mandates something you can't solve with Linux the issue is with your work and you should push to change that.
It's always been an app in addition to a website.
Including taxes, getting a covid certificate, applying to rent an apartment.
Also, as person living in sweden, let me tell you that marketing as inclusive is not the same as being inclusive. Spending money to let disabled people be able to get on trains, or checking that accessibility laws are respected (they aren't) are not things that happen in sweden.
Just last month I encountered a broken elevator at a train station. Which means no taking the train if you're on a wheelchair (and good luck with getting a refund). Even worse, if you actually were on the train, you're now stuck on the platform and can't leave until the next train shows up. Of course to buy the ticket for the next train you will need a smartphone.
The Apple Developer Program is only needed for macOS if you want to do sign your binaries or distribute through the Mac App Store. And you only have to pay Microsoft if you want to publish to the Microsoft Store (or use Visual Studio if you're a company that has more than 5 Visual Studio users, more than 250 computers, or more than $1 Million USD in annual revenue).
> buy certificates for signing binaries
Fair (though both Windows and macOS will run apps that haven't been signed, with more warnings of course).
> share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason
Only if you use their stores (Mac App Store or Microsoft Store), and it looks like the Microsoft Store won't take any cut if you do your own payments and it's not a game.
Your solution solves a made up problem that nobody cares about, and doesn't solve the one that actually matters, which is to successfully make and distribute good software to users.
Someone shouldn't have to add the the fine print line "Assume I am talking about things that matter, instead of things that don't" to every statement or opinion that they have.
A lot of it introduced from 2017 onwards and I think now it says something akin to "this application will hack your computer and is a virus" and you need to click the smaller hidden "ignore"s a few times to do what you want.
well as someone who runs a few unsigned binaries myself. Its not hard if you know what to do but apple makes a big deal about how its "unsafe" and this freaks non tech people out.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060925013545/http://www.making...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvfD5rnkTws
Seriously, though, I've had the Windows Defender thing happen to freshly compiled binaries I made. The only way to prevent it from happening is to sign your binaries, or submit them individually to Microsoft using your Microsoft account for malware analysis.
It flagged the binary as being some sort of trojan (which name I looked up and found that it was a Windows Defender designation for "I don't know the provenance of this binary so I'm going to assume it's bad") and quarantined it.
Does the App Store collect sales tax and remit on your behalf? If it does then I think it's worth it or face registering both in the EU and UK ($0 tax threshold) as well as 50 US states (once you hit the allowed limit) will take you a long time.
This paperwork is what I believe a marketplace like the App Store or Amazon do for you under their own entity that you have to do yourself if you bypass their stores.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Galvix.
If you're shipping overseas, you can probably ignore foreign taxes if you don't have a business nexus there. Especially if you have no desire to ever visit those countries. Basically just leave it up to your customers to pay whatever tax they owe.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.
https://stripe.com/guides/introduction-to-eu-vat-and-vat-oss
Obviously, its not a good idea to bet your business on the courts not enforcing an EU fine when you can just add the VAT and cost of the handling hassle to the price for EU customers.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...
It's clearly an awful "patch" to outdated concepts on how commerce works compared to pre-internet, but it's what we have right now.
Right. Plus it might hinder your ability to travel freely in those jurisdictions as well which I'd like to avoid.
That said, I don't know about Mac, but you can build apps using free tools - maybe in not as convenient way, but certainly you can.
I remember, because I was someone who couldn't afford Visual Studio licence and had to make do with GNU tools.
The greed of these companies put me off from developing anything.
Which leaves the certificate thing and while it’s an annoyance, it’s also nice as a software user to know that a program I’m running is the program it claims to be without much friction on my part, and the cost can’t be that prohibitive since I don’t remember the last time I ended up with an unsigned binary on my Mac, even for free software like TeX and friends or Aquamacs.
Ok, so your app tastes aren't that varied then (or maybe it's the memory), plenty of devs of various little utilities don't bother paying
Sometimes devs are locked into the tools they use. This situation is shit, but not uncommon.
Not true. The technical term for "ultimately need money" is discounted future cash flow. It is impossible to know for sure what price you have to charge for any particular item at any given time in order to optimise for this metric.
Realistically, the answer depends on the state of competition between platforms. We all know what that state is.
so it is true, you can't provide any top-level logic to justify 0, you need some facts
As this is such a pointlessly contrived interpretation of the term "logic" in this context, I chose to use a different one: Is there a set of empirical circumstances under which an optimisation algorithm could conclude that the optimal price is zero? The answer to that is clearly yes.
Now, what exactly is the point of you insisting on your wrong interpretation?
They want to be feudal lords, requiring us to pay a tithing for the privilege of selling something to customers.
You, of course, want to be their feudal lord and get access to all their customers by right while also requiring them to pay a tithing of their hardware sales to you since you advance "their ultimate benefit" (they wouldn't sell any hardware without software)
If someone buys an iPhone, Apple does not have the right to interpose themselves between that person and what they want to do with the iphone they bought. They have no right to a cut of the sales any more than the power company that provided the electrons to charge the battery.
What I want is for Apple to get out of the way.
> while also requiring them to pay a tithing of their hardware sales to you since you advance
What I want them to do, for a start, is to the same thing on ios that they already do on macos. I can already write a piece of software an sell it without forking 30% over to Apple.
The current situation where they feel entitled to a cut of every software sale that happens on ios, and veto power over it, is a wet dream that even Microsoft in the 90s wouldn't have thought they'd get away with.
I'd happily build iOS apps without XCode or any of Apple's frameworks to save the 30% fee. Heck, I'd do it even if I still had to pay the 30%, I hate being forced to use XCode.
That’s just your opinion though isn’t it
My opinion is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my opinion is useless. Without my opinion, I am useless."
Older M1 devices which are still very fast are available for much cheaper.
Choosing overly complex web frameworks is still a guilty pleasure of too many projects.
What on earth is happening in this comment section?
I might be wrong here as I have been focused pretty much only on mobile, so feel free to correct me.
Switching ecosystems isn't that trivial.
Platform choices are dependent on numerous complex product groups, content and tool investments, integrated technologies, network effects between people, between companies, ongoing financial commitments, on and on.
As for developers, they often need to be on the top 2-3 platforms to be a serious choice for customers.
Nobody (sensible) is going to switch platforms over a single issue. Or when the person giving advice has no deep knowledge of who they are giving it to.
It is just not helpful advice.
Only direct product properties should drive users' choices, everything else just raises the market entry barrier for potential competitors.
As for, Apple, I do not know but I suspect you can make Mac applications without a developer account. You need a developer account for iPhone. It's $99 a year the last time I looked. This is not a lot of money if you are serious about making an application.
Compare with the web where LetsEncrypt just works without demanding a king's ransom.
As for the APIs, it is very easy to get into dependency hell between all the different UI technologies, .NET implementations, and target systems. Want to develop a brand new plain-old GUI app? Probably simple (although I've never tried, the web is right there). Need to develop a plugin for an existing application, or a new app for something like Hololens? Have fun.
It is a lot of money when you consider it should be free and serves exactly no purpose.
Maybe not for you.
Considering the whole point to have Windows is to use apps I'd expect they made the process super smooth.
Once the beancounters at the rent-seeking companies (Apple, Microsoft, …) have figured out that web development is where all the money is, this will change rapidly. Google has already started gatekeeping the web via Chrome.