The 30% Tax Is Optional Now
For years, building a mobile app meant accepting Apple's deal: give us 30% of every subscription, every purchase, every dollar your users spend. That was the cost of distribution.
That deal has changed.
In 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the Epic v. Apple injunction. Apple must now allow developers to direct users to alternative payment methods. In the EU, the Digital Markets Act arrived first. The result is the same: the 30% cut is no longer mandatory.
I spent some time this week looking at ZeroSettle — a YC-backed SDK that operationalises this right. The pitch is straightforward: swap Apple's 30% for their 5% + 50¢, keep the difference, let users pay less.
Here's what I actually found.
The user experience question
My first question was: how much friction does this add for users?
The answer, at least in the US on iOS, is: less than I expected.
ZeroSettle presents a native-feeling bottom sheet inside your app. Apple Pay is the primary option. Card entry is the fallback. Users never leave the app. On a warm load it opens in under a second. It looks and feels like a standard StoreKit sheet — Stripe under the hood, not that users would know.
Outside the US, it degrades. EU users get an in-app browser or Safari — a noticeable context switch. Android opens a full-screen WebView Activity, rougher than iOS. The product is clearly optimised for US iOS first.
The friction delta in the US: minimal. If your user has Apple Pay set up, it's one Face ID tap, same as StoreKit.
Do you still have to offer the App Store?
Yes — but you can demote it.
Apple's current rules require that StoreKit remain available as an option when you're using the External Purchase entitlement. You can't block it entirely. But you can:
Present direct billing as the primary button with the App Store as a smaller secondary option
Offer a discount for going direct ("Subscribe and save 15%")
Run campaigns that migrate existing App Store subscribers over time
ZeroSettle handles the compliance automatically — the required Apple disclosure modal, jurisdiction detection, silent fallback to StoreKit outside the US and EU. You write a few lines of code and the SDK figures out the rest.
The math
On $1M ARR with 75% of users migrating to direct billing and a 10% discount incentive to make the switch worth their while:
Without ZeroSettle: Apple keeps $300K (30% of $1M)
With ZeroSettle: You pay ~\(112K (discount + ZeroSettle fee) instead of \)300K
Net extra profit: ~$188K/year
The calculator on their site is worth playing with. The economics are compelling at any meaningful scale.
At small scale — say, $50K ARR — the absolute numbers are smaller but the margin improvement is the same. 25 percentage points of net margin is 25 percentage points regardless of revenue size.
What I'd watch
ZeroSettle is early. They just launched on Product Hunt. The legal framework they're operating in is new — the Epic injunction only took effect in 2025 and Apple is still testing what they can push back on.
The compliance story is good but it's worth monitoring. Apple has a history of finding ways to make alternatives less attractive (see: Apple's 27% link-out fee, which Apple introduced post-injunction and was forced to remove in 2025). The DMA in the EU has seen similar friction.
That said: this is not a loophole. It's a court order and a legislative requirement. The direction of travel is toward developer rights, not away from them. Hundreds of major apps already offer external billing. This is becoming standard practice, not early-adopter territory.
If you're building a mobile subscription product, it's worth at least running the calculator and understanding what you're leaving on the table.
I'm building Heldcraft — a software studio. This is part of my ongoing research into tools and trends relevant to mobile and SaaS product development.