Below $14.29 a month, leaving Google Play’s checkout costs more than staying.

The number every plan is built on is 30%. It has not been the marginal rate for a developer under a million dollars since the App Store Small Business Program dropped it to 15% in 2021, and it has not been the rate on a linked-out purchase on the United States storefront at all since 1 May 2025. Appfigures put Apple’s US App Store commission take above $10 billion for 2024, which is the figure that keeps the folklore alive. The folklore is now about four percentage points and one court order out of date, and the gap between what people think the rails cost and what the published schedules say they cost is the whole of today’s trade.

Start with the document rather than the coverage. Epic Games, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 4:20-cv-05640, ECF No. 1508, decided 30 April 2025 by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California, found that Apple had willfully violated her 2021 injunction, referred the conduct to the United States Attorney for that district to “investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate,” and prohibited Apple from “imposing any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside an app.” Five further prohibitions came with it: no auditing or tracking of those purchases, no conditions on how a link is styled, worded, formatted or placed, no excluding categories of app or developer from link access, no interference beyond one neutral message, and no blocking of dynamic links that open a logged-in product page. It was effective immediately. The remedy everyone remembers is the 27% Apple had been charging on off-app purchases; the operative part is the sentence that replaced it with nothing.

Apple’s own rulebook now carries it. The App Review Guidelines at 3.1.1(a) read: “Developers may apply for entitlements to provide a link in their app to a permitted destination in order to purchase digital content or services. These entitlements are not required for developers to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action in their United States storefront apps.” Guideline 3.1.3(a) repeats it for reader apps, and 3.1.1 carves the United States out of the NFT prohibition by name. There is no form, no entitlement, no addendum and no fee. In the European Union, where the Digital Markets Act was supposed to be the thing that opened this door, there is a Core Technology Commission, a store services tier and an initial acquisition fee. The jurisdiction that got to zero got there by contempt.

Then read who is fighting it and how far along they are, because that is the expiry date. The Ninth Circuit decided No. 25-2935 on 11 December 2025 — Circuit Judges Sidney R. Thomas and Milan D. Smith, Jr., with Chief District Judge Michael J. McShane sitting by designation, Judge Smith writing. It affirmed the contempt, declined to vacate the injunction, held that the relief “will continue to apply to all linked-out purchases and not just to Epic Games Store” links, and held that “the Injunction is not an impermissible nationwide injunction.” But it reversed on the one point that matters to the price: “the commission prohibition is not an appropriately cabined civil contempt sanction,” because it “permanently prohibits the compensation that Apple can receive for linked-out purchases.” On remand the district court must either make the prohibition purgeable or re-impose it as a modification of the injunction. Everything else “remain[s] in full effect.”

So the zero is live and provisional at the same time, and both halves of that are on public dockets. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on 30 June 2026 in Apple Inc. v. Epic Games, Inc., No. 25-1311, decision below 161 F.4th 1162, limited to the first question presented: “Whether a court may hold a party in civil contempt based on a violation of an injunction’s ‘spirit’ where the injunction is silent as to the conduct upon which contempt is based.” Apple’s merits brief and the joint appendix were filed 14 September 2026; Epic’s brief is due 13 November 2026; the United States filed an amicus brief in support of neither party on 21 September 2026. Separately, Apple asked to freeze the district court while the appeal ran: application No. 26A194, administratively stayed by Justice Kagan on 12 August 2026 and denied the next day. Judge Gonzalez Rogers had already refused the same request on 11 August 2026, calling the commission “a factual issue” for her to decide.

Which produced the most useful document of the year for anyone pricing this: on 13 August 2026 Apple filed what it proposes to charge. 15% for standard apps, 10% for the Video, News and Mini Apps Partner Programs, 10% on subscription renewals, and 5% for small-business developers. Apple justified the card by pointing at Google’s linked-out rates — 20%, 15% and 10% — and noting that Epic had agreed to those. Epic’s newsroom called the numbers “far outside of the bounds” of the Ninth Circuit’s guidance and said Apple had conceded that, under that court’s own definition of necessary costs, the number would be 0%. The court has not ruled. A developer reading that filing is being handed the strike price of an option that is currently free.

Now the Android mirror, which is where the non-consensus part lives, because Android has already walked the whole path. The Ninth Circuit upheld Judge James Donato’s injunction on 12 September 2025; from 29 October 2025 Google’s own policy page states that “Google will not require the use of Google Play Billing in apps distributed on the Google Play Store”; the alternative billing and external content links programmes opened on 9 December 2025; a revised settlement with Epic went to the court on 4 March 2026; catalog access and third-party stores on Play took effect 22 July 2026. On 24 June 2026, Paul Feng, Vice President of Google Play, published the new schedule: the service fee was cut to 10% on the first $1M of annual earnings and on all auto-renewing subscriptions, and separated from a 5% billing fee charged only when the transaction runs through Google Play’s billing system, in the US, UK and EEA, from 30 June 2026.

Read that schedule as a price rather than as a concession and it inverts. The 10% service fee follows the customer out of the app: Google’s external content links page charges it on “purchases or installs completed within 24 hours of following an external link,” and the recurring-subscription column reads 10% across every tier — first $1M, standard, and the Apps Experience and Games Level Up programmes alike. The only thing you shed by leaving is the 5% billing fee, and you immediately buy a worse one: Stripe’s US card price of 2.9% + 30¢, or 3.6% + 30¢ once Stripe Billing’s 0.7% is added for the subscription logic Google was handling for free. So staying costs a flat 15% and leaving costs 12.9% + 30¢, and that fixed thirty cents is the whole story: the two are equal at $14.29 a month, and below it the exit is the more expensive door. At the canonical $9.99, Google Play Billing costs $1.4985 and your own checkout costs $1.5887. The escape hatch everybody spent five years litigating for loses 9 cents a subscriber a month.

The same arithmetic run on the other store is why the trade is worth doing at all. With no commission, the iOS exit costs 2.9% + 30¢, which crosses the flat 15% at $2.48 — below that price a zero-commission link-out is still worse than in-app purchase, because thirty cents is 12% of a $2.49 subscription. Above it the gap opens fast. At $9.99 the iOS link-out costs $0.5897 against $1.4985 in-app: you keep $9.40 instead of $8.49. And the distance between the iOS line today and the Google line today is $0.999 a subscriber a month — which is, to within a tenth of a cent, exactly what Apple’s 13 August filing asks for on subscription renewals. The window has a posted price and it is one dollar per subscriber per month.

One more line nobody has priced, because it has not started yet. Google’s external content links programme also charges a flat fee per install on download links — $3.65 for games and $2.85 for apps, “subject to periodic adjustment” — and the deadline to report and pay it was moved on 17 September 2026 to 1 December 2026. It is the first per-install price either store has published in the United States, it is flat rather than proportional, and a flat fee is a regressive tax on cheap customers and a rounding error on expensive ones. The firms that will care are the ones acquiring installs; the subscription seller reading this is being charged nothing for an install, which is the part of the schedule worth owning.