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Comment on Google will consider lowering Play Store cut to 15% for certain appsparent

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It's unusual to pay higher fees the more you sell.

This is probably an indication that Google/Apple make most of their App Store profits from a small number of big developers.

Back when Apple announced this there was a good discussion about it on Accidental Tech Podcast, about how this was a really smart move.

It gives a price cut to the most number of people, but requires Apple to give the least amount of money away. This gives them really good press, and helps them to deal with their "image issues" that they have at the moment. Basically a win win.

The stranger thing is for small apps Apple/Google is providing services of more than 30% I think. Basically they are managing everything and a lot of time also promoting it for a small price. But the apps that are already famous like fortnite, a user who install it will likely install if Apple/Google is not involved.

It's an indication of a monopoly with a lack of competitive pressure.

It's not that unusual actually. Think of all the Saas apps that charge you by tier based on some arbitrary limits.

Sure, in those cases you consume more resources, but those are probably negligible compared to the increase in price. The reality is that they charge you more because you make more money from the service, hence you are willing to pay.

It's not precisely the same, obviously. For one, you can chose the services you want, while you must go through Apple's App Store. And since they don't charge a percentage of revenue but charge for resources, you don't see the correlation.

But the final effect is the same. The more money you make, the more you pay.

No, in most SaaS environments bigger customers are more expensive to maintain. They are harder to shard or migrate when you need to keep their data accessible, linked, etc... That's why there are limits in the first place and the don't really have to be arbitrary.

I don’t know about most. Value based pricing is common concept in SaaS and it explicitly doesn’t price based on the cost of delivering the service.

That said, a lot of higher tier offerings in SaaS differentiate themselves by SLAs, Support, assigned CSM, consulting time, etc. Those are cheap-iah to deliver when everything goes well but can cost a lot when there are problems.

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