Apple forces Patreon to charge Patreons 30% tax, or have its iOS application banned from the App Store

I have no contracts, agreements, or business with Apple, I do not use any Apple products, I do not rely on any Apple services, and none of my work requires the use of any of Apple’s tools. Yet, I’m forced to deal with Apple’s 30% tax. Today, Patreon, which quite a few of you use to support OSNews, announced that Apple is forcing them to change its billing system, or risk being banned from the App Store. This has some serious consequences for people who use Patreon’s iOS application to subscribe to Patreons, and for the creators you subscribe to. First:

Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop.
↫ Patreon’s website

First things first: the 30% mafia tax will only be applied to new Patreons subscribers using the Patreon iOS application to subscribe, starting early November 2024. Existing Patreons will not be affected, iOS or no. Anyone who subscribes through the Patreon website or Android application will not be affected either. Since creators like myself obviously have no intention of just handing over 30% of what our iOS-using supporters donate to us, Patreon has added an option to automatically increase the prices of subscriptions inside the Patreon iOS application by 30%.

In other words, starting this November, subscribing to the OSNews Patreon through the iOS application will be 30% more expensive than subscribing from anywhere else. As such, I’m pondering updating the description of our Patreon to strongly suggest anyone wishing to subscribe to the OSNews Patreon to do so either on the web, or through the Patreon Android application instead. If you’re hell-bent on subscribing through the Patreon iOS application, you’ll be charged an additional 30% to pay protection money to Apple.

And just to reiterate once more: if you’re already a Patreon, nothing will change and you’ll continue to pay the regular amounts per tier.

Second:

Any creator currently on first-of-the-month or per-creation billing plans will have to switch over to subscription billing to continue earning in the iOS app, because that’s the only billing type Apple’s in-app purchase system supports.
↫ Patreon’s website

This is Patreon inside baseball, but as it stands right now, subscribers to the OSNews Patreon are billed on the first of the month, regardless of when during a month you subscribe. This is intentional, since I really like the clarity it provides to subscribers, and the monthly paycheck it results in for myself. Sadly, Apple is forcing Patreon to force me to change this – I am now forced to switch to subscription billing instead, somewhere before November 2025. This means that once I make that forced switch, new Patreons will be billed on their subscription date every month (if you subscribe on 25 April, you’ll be charged every 25th of the month). Luckily, nothing will change for existing subscribers – you will still be billed on the 1st of the month.

This whole thing is absolutely batshit insane. Not only is Patreon being forced by Apple to do this at the risk of having their iOS application banned from the App Store, Apple is also making it explicitly impossible for Patreon to go any other route. As we all know, Patreon won’t be allowed to advertise that subscribing will be cheaper on the web, but Apple is also not allowing Patreon to remove subscribing in the Patreon iOS application altogether – if Patreon were to do that, Apple will ban the application from the App Store as well. And with how many people use iOS, just outright deprecating the Patreon iOS application is most likely going to hurt a lot of creators, especially ones outside of the tech sphere.

Steven Troughton-Smith did some math, and concluded that Apple will be making six times as much from donations to Patreon creators than Patreon itself will. In other words, if you use iOS, and subscribe to a creator from within the Patreon iOS application, you will be supporting Apple – a three trillion dollar corporation – more than Patreon, which is actually making it possible to support the small creators you love in the first place. That is absolutely, balls-to-the-wall, batshit insanity.

Remember that ad Apple made where it crushed a bunch of priceless instruments and art supplies into an iPad – the ad it had to pull and apologise for because creators, artists, writers, and so on thought it was tasteless and dystopian?

Who knew that ad was literal.