How to Cut Your App Store Commission From 30% to 15%

Everyone knows the 30%. Apple takes a third of whatever you sell on the App Store. Sell $1,000 and $300 goes to Apple, leaving you $700.

What most developers miss is that we don’t all pay 30%. There’s a programme that drops Apple’s cut to 15%, and if you’re an indie developer the odds are good you qualify.

It’s the App Store Small Business Program. Easy to treat 30% as just the cost of being on the store. For most of us it isn’t.

What the Small Business Program is

Apple set this up in 2021, aimed at indie developers, small studios and anyone newer to the store. Qualify, and your commission on paid apps and in-app purchases drops to 15%.

Fifteen more cents on every dollar, in your pocket instead of Apple’s. The catch: nothing happens on its own. You opt in, or you keep paying 30%.

Who qualifies

One number decides it. You need less than $1 million in proceeds for the previous calendar year.

Proceeds, not sales. That distinction matters. Proceeds are what reaches you after Apple’s cut and any taxes, not the gross your customers paid. So in the $1,000 example, your proceeds were the $700 that landed in your account, not the grand on the receipt.

It’s a forgiving way to measure. You can be turning over well past a million gross and still sit under the line on proceeds.

Brand new and never enrolled? You qualify automatically.

The thing to watch is associated developer accounts. Plenty of people run more than one: a second for a client, something for a side project, a separate company. If you control others, or another account controls yours, Apple totals the proceeds across all of them before measuring you against the million. You declare them when you apply. You can’t spin up accounts to duck under the limit.

What happens when you cross the threshold

Your revenue won’t sit still forever, so it’s worth knowing what happens either way.

Cross a million part-way through the year, say in June, and Apple doesn’t bill you for the difference. You move to 30% on everything from that point on, and the earlier sales stay at 15%.

Going the other way takes longer. Have a quieter year, dip back under a million, and you’re eligible again, but not right away. The check runs once a year, so the 15% rate returns the following January rather than the moment you drop under. Bumped up in June means 30% for the rest of that year.

So enrol early in the year, and check where you stand every January.

How to enrol

Applying takes a couple of minutes.

1. You have to be the Account Holder, the owner of the developer account, not a team member with access.
2. Accept the current Paid Applications agreement in App Store Connect if you haven’t already.
3. On the enrolment page, list any associated developer accounts. Only got the one? Say so.
4. Submit.

Apple usually replies within a week. Approval doesn’t flip the rate on the spot, though. The new rate starts 15 days after the end of the fiscal month they approve you in. So get approved in early February and you’re looking at mid-March before the 15% shows up.

The short version

Hardly any indie developer clears a million a year in proceeds, so almost everyone reading this qualifies.

And it adds up. That 15% comes off every transaction, month after month. On $100,000 of proceeds in a year, it’s $15,000 you keep instead of hand to Apple.

Enrolling costs nothing, and there’s no real downside unless you’re about to cross the line anyway. If you haven’t done it, it’s about the easiest money you’ll find this year. Worth the ten minutes.

One caveat for 2026: the rules are shifting in places. The EU runs its own arrangements under the Digital Markets Act, and the US opened up external payment links after the Epic v. Apple case.

For most developers the Small Business Program is still the simplest way to cut your commission. But if a real chunk of your revenue comes from subscriptions, or from the EU, check the current regional terms before you count on anything.