Understand how the small business commission programs actually work
Most coverage of App Store fees still treats 15% as the small business rate, full stop. That's no longer close to the full picture. According to some analysts, following the October 1, 2026 changes, an EU developer routing payment through the web may pay a rate in the low double digits, while one processing the same transaction in-app could face something closer to the mid-20s. A single subscription app can now legally owe three different commission rates depending on the subscriber's country and checkout method. Which raises the obvious problem: how does a developer figure out which rate applies to which user without the math turning into a full-time job?
The core qualifying rule is revenue, not app category or how popular the platform thinks you are. A developer or company has to have earned no more than $1 million in total proceeds, after the platform's cut, in the previous calendar year. Apple applies this threshold across all Associated Developer Accounts, so if a studio runs multiple developer accounts, everything gets summed before checking it against the $1 million cap. First-time developers qualify automatically, since there's no prior year of earnings to measure against.
Once qualified, the 15% rate applies broadly: paid app downloads, in-app purchases, subscriptions, all of it drops from the standard 30% to 15%. Don't confuse this with Apple's separate subscription-specific discount, where any subscription, regardless of program enrollment, drops to a lower rate after a subscriber's first year compared to year one. The small business program and the year-two subscription discount are two different mechanisms that happen to land in similar territory. That overlap trips people up constantly.
Google Play structures its reduced rate differently but lands in roughly the same place. Developers generally pay a reduced rate on the first $1 million or so in annual earnings from an app, with the standard rate kicking in only above that line. So a developer whose app earns $1.2 million in a year pays 15% on the first million and the higher standard rate on the remaining $200,000. You don't lose the discount entirely just because you crossed the threshold. Content-access apps get an extra carve-out worth knowing about. Apps whose main job is accessing content already purchased or subscribed to elsewhere, magazines, audiobooks, music, video, can sometimes skip in-app commission entirely by sending users to subscribe on the web. Netflix, Spotify, Kindle, and Audible all run this way. Games, productivity tools, and social apps don't get this exception, since playing back content isn't their core function.
None of these programs demand a separate application beyond standard developer account enrollment and revenue reporting. Apple requires developers to actively enroll and re-confirm eligibility every year. Google's threshold model applies automatically based on reported earnings, no enrollment step needed. Both platforms calculate the $1 million threshold using the developer's own reported proceeds, after the platform's cut.
These baseline US and global rules are the easy part. Things get genuinely complicated once an app is distributed in the European Union, where rate structures now split sharply depending on payment method.
Weigh the new EU-specific rate options against the standard programs
Starting October 1, 2026, Apple is rolling out an EU-specific fee structure for any app distributed within the EU, separate from the global small business program above. Under this structure, the standard rate for purchases processed through Apple's own payment system drops from 30% to 26%. Developers who use an alternative payment processor, or link out to the web for billing instead of processing payment in-app, can drop further still, down to 15% or even 10%. This is the change that makes the three-rate scenario from the intro possible: the same subscription app can now owe different amounts depending on whether the subscriber is in the EU and how they pay.
Google reportedly introduced its own EEA-specific model around mid-2026. Widely cited figures put Google's EEA rate around 10% on subscriptions and on a developer's first $1 million in annual earnings, lower than Google's global 15% small business rate. Apple and Google got to different numbers through different mechanisms entirely, so a developer distributing the same app in the US, the EU, and everywhere else is now juggling three separate fee schedules instead of one.
That creates a real decision point for anyone running a subscription app with EU users. A Danish subscriber paying through the app after October 1, 2026 falls under Apple's new EU rate, not Apple's global standard rate. If that developer's app already qualifies for the global Small Business Program at 15%, they now have to weigh that against the EU options: 26% for in-app Apple payment processing, or as low as 10% to 15% by routing billing through an alternative processor or the web. For a developer already near or under the $1 million threshold, the EU web-linkout path can actually beat the small business program's 15%, and that's the comparison that matters most for creator-focused apps.
Creator subscription apps make the stakes obvious. Meta's Instagram Subscriptions feature takes 0% of subscription revenue directly, so whatever a creator loses comes entirely from Apple's or Google's store-level commission, not from Meta. Under Apple's older global figures, that meant roughly 30% in a subscriber's first year and roughly 15% after, and those numbers still hold for subscribers outside the EU. But for an EU-based subscriber paying in-app after October 2026, the relevant number becomes Apple's new 26% EU standard rate, unless the creator's app offers an alternative payment processor or web-based checkout, which pushes the effective rate down to 10% or 15%. That configuration choice is exactly what developers need to plan around now, not later.
Here's the practical approach for an indie developer building a subscription app today. Check earnings against the $1 million threshold first, since that determines eligibility for Apple's Small Business Program or Google's 15% bracket globally. Then check EU distribution status separately, because the October 2026 Apple structure and the June 2026 Google EEA structure run on different rules and different dates than the global programs. A developer under the $1 million threshold with no EU users only has to track one rate. A developer with real EU subscriber revenue now has to model at least two, and possibly three, fee structures depending on whether users pay in-app or through a linked-out web checkout. That's exactly where third-party tracking tools earn their keep.
RevenueCat and similar subscription infrastructure platforms have started building configuration options specifically to reflect these split rates in analytics and revenue reporting, because manually tracking which subscriber falls under which regional rate and payment method has become genuinely error-prone at any real scale. That tooling gap answers the question the intro raised: at scale, nobody does this math by hand. Eligibility for the $1 million threshold sets the baseline rate, EU distribution and payment method determine which additional tier applies on top of it, and infrastructure platforms exist specifically to apply that logic per subscriber, not per app.