App Store Fees in 2026: When Apple and Google Take a Cut
Most small business apps never pay Apple or Google a commission on anything. The 30 percent figure you have read about applies to digital goods and subscriptions bought inside the app, and to nothing else. If your app books appointments, tracks jobs, sells physical products, or gives customers an account for work you deliver in the real world, your store costs are the developer account fees and that is the end of it. Apple says this in its own App Review Guidelines, section 3.1.3(e): apps that let people buy "physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app" must use payment methods other than in-app purchase.
That single sentence decides the whole question for most owners. Everything below is for the minority it does not cover.
The question that decides whether you owe a commission
Ask what the customer is buying and where they use it.
If the thing being bought is digital and consumed inside the app — a premium tier, a coin balance, an ad-free upgrade, a content subscription — you have to sell it through the store's billing system, and the store takes a cut. If the thing being bought is physical, or is a service a human performs in the real world, you take payment through your own processor and the stores take nothing beyond the annual account fee.
A gym app that sells a ten-class pack redeemed at the front desk is outside the system. The same app selling an in-app video library is inside it. A contractor app that invoices for a completed job is outside. A meditation app charging monthly for audio files is inside.
Google's own service fee page notes that 97 percent of developers distribute their apps and use Google Play at no charge, which is the same point from the other direction. Commission is a minority experience because in-app digital sales are a minority use case.
What Apple takes, as of August 2026
The Apple Developer Program costs 99 USD per membership year. You pay that whether or not you ever sell anything, and you pay it every year for as long as the app is listed.
On in-app digital sales, Apple's auto-renewable subscriptions page states the split plainly: during a subscriber's first year of service you receive 70 percent of the price at each billing cycle, and after a subscriber accumulates one year of paid service your net revenue rises to 85 percent. In commission terms that is 30 percent falling to 15 percent, and the clock is per subscription group rather than per customer relationship.
The App Store Small Business Program changes the starting point. Developers who made up to 1 million USD in proceeds across all their apps in the prior calendar year, plus developers new to the App Store, qualify for a reduced commission rate of 15 percent on paid apps and in-app purchases. Enrolled developers receive 85 percent at every billing cycle without waiting out the one-year threshold. If you are a small business commissioning your first app, this is the rate that applies to you, not the headline number.
What Google takes, and what changed on June 30
Google restructured its fees this summer, and the change is recent enough that most articles still describe the old model. On its Android Developers Blog on June 24, 2026, Google announced that from June 30, 2026 in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, one fee becomes two.
The service fee is 10 percent on your first 1 million USD in annual earnings, and 10 percent on all auto-renewing subscriptions. A separate billing fee of 5 percent applies only when you use Google Play's own checkout — it does not apply to alternative billing systems or to purchases made through a link out to your own website.
One-time purchases depend on when the customer first installed. Google's service fee page puts new installs at 10 percent plus the 5 percent billing fee, and existing installs — customers who first installed or updated before June 30, 2026 — at 25 percent plus the billing fee, or 20 percent through an external web link. Outside those three regions the older structure still stands: 15 percent on the first 1 million USD of annual earnings, 30 percent above it, and 15 percent on subscriptions.
Registration on Google Play is a 25 USD one-time fee, not annual, which is a genuine difference from Apple over a long-lived app.
An illustrative scenario
To make the arithmetic concrete — and to be clear, this is a worked example rather than a customer of ours — suppose a physiotherapy clinic launches an app with two revenue lines. Appointments are booked in the app and paid at a rate of 90 dollars per session. A home-exercise video library is offered at 8 dollars a month.
The appointment revenue is a real-world service. It never touches store billing, so Apple and Google take nothing from it, and the clinic pays only its own card processor's published rate. The video library is a digital subscription consumed in the app, so it must go through store billing. Under the Small Business Program on iOS, the clinic keeps 6.80 dollars of every 8. On Google Play in the US, the 10 percent service fee plus the 5 percent billing fee leaves 6.80 as well.
The uncomfortable part is not the commission. It is that the 8-dollar line needs a few hundred paying subscribers before it covers the cost of building and maintaining the feature, while the 90-dollar line was worth building on day one. Fee percentages are rarely what decides whether a feature is a good idea.
The costs that do not disappear when the commission does
Owing no commission is not the same as owing nothing. The developer accounts renew. Your own payment processor charges its published rate on every card transaction, which you should read off that processor's own pricing page rather than a comparison article. Any backend you run has a monthly bill. And the app needs maintenance whether it earns money or not, which is a schedule Apple and Google set rather than you — we walked through what actually happens to an app you stop updating earlier this month.
If you are still working out whether the whole thing is worth it, the honest version of that question is in does my small business need a mobile app, and the build side of the arithmetic is in our cost breakdown.
Where we are the wrong fit
If commission rates are central to your business model, you are probably building a consumer subscription app that lives or dies on paywall experiments, price testing, and retention tuning after launch. That is a specialist job and an ongoing one. We build and ship fixed-price apps well; we are not the right partner for a team that needs a growth engineer iterating on a paywall every fortnight. Hire for that directly, or work with a studio that sells retained product work.
For an owner whose app supports a real-world business, the store fees are a footnote, and we would rather you spent the planning time on the thing customers actually pay for.
Model your own numbers
If you do have a digital revenue line, put your real figures into the free app revenue calculator. It runs in your browser, needs no signup, and models churn and store fees together, which is where most back-of-envelope estimates go wrong.
When you are ready to talk about what building it actually costs, our pricing is published in full.
Your app. In the stores. Done for you. US APP Team designs, builds, and launches your iOS and Android app for a fixed price. Start your app brief or book a free intro call — both are free.
Want to poke around first? Every tool in our free tool library runs in your browser with no signup: an app cost calculator, an app name generator, and a privacy policy generator.
