Apple Small Business Program: How to Get the 15% Commission

Cutting Apple's commission from 30% to 15% is the easiest 15 points of margin you will ever find. The catch is that Apple will not do it for you, and there is a $1 million line you do not want to cross by accident.

The Apple Small Business Program is the reason most indie developers pay 15% instead of 30% on the App Store, and it is worth understanding exactly, because the details decide whether you are in it, when you fall out of it, and how much you actually keep. I have been shipping apps since 2012 and running them through this program for years, and I still see developers who assume it is automatic. It is not.

This post is the plain-English walkthrough: what the Apple Small Business Program is, who qualifies, how to enroll, what happens the day you cross $1 million, and the one thing a lower commission does not fix. If you sell paid apps or in-app purchases and you are under a million dollars a year, this is 15 points of your revenue sitting on the table until you claim it.

What the Apple Small Business Program is

The Apple Small Business Program is a reduced commission tier. Apple's standard cut on paid apps and in-app purchases is 30%. The program lowers that to 15% for qualifying developers, on paid apps and In-App Purchases. Apple launched it on January 1, 2021, after announcing it in November 2020 (Apple Newsroom).

In practical terms, it flips your split. Without the program, a $100 sale nets you $70 and Apple keeps $30. Inside the program, that same $100 sale nets you $85 and Apple keeps $15. Same price, same customer, 15 extra points of margin, purely because you enrolled. For a developer doing $200,000 a year, that is roughly $30,000 that stays with you instead of Apple.

It is the App Store's version of a service fee break for small developers, and it covers the vast majority of indie and small-studio apps, because the vast majority earn well under the threshold. If you want the one-paragraph definition alongside Google's equivalent, I keep it in the glossary entry on the Small Business Program. This post is the longer version, because the qualifying rules are where developers get tripped up.

Who qualifies for the 15% commission

The rule is a dollar threshold, and the exact wording matters. Per Apple's official program page, you qualify if you and your associated developer accounts earned no more than 1 million USD in total proceeds during the previous calendar year, and have earned no more than 1 million USD during the current year. Developers who are new to the App Store, with no prior-year sales, also qualify.

The word that trips people up is proceeds. Apple defines proceeds as your sales net of Apple's commission and certain taxes and adjustments. That is not the same as your gross revenue. Proceeds are what actually lands in your account after Apple takes its cut. So the $1 million line is drawn on your take-home, not on your gross App Store sales. At a 15% commission, a developer keeping $1 million in proceeds grossed closer to $1.18 million. That gap gives you more headroom than the number first suggests.

One more detail that surprises people: associated developer accounts count together. If you control more than one Apple Developer account, or your accounts are controlled by a common owner, Apple pools their proceeds toward the single $1 million threshold. You cannot split a large business across accounts to stay under. For most solo developers this is a non-issue, but if you run multiple entities, add them up before you assume you qualify.

How to enroll (it is not automatic)

Here is the part I wish someone had told me plainly: enrolling in the Apple Small Business Program is a manual step. Being under $1 million does not put you in it. Apple keeps charging you 30% until you opt in.

To enroll, you go into App Store Connect as the Account Holder, review and accept the current Paid Apps agreement, which Apple lists as Schedule 2, and if you have associated developer accounts you list them as part of the process. Once accepted, the 15% rate applies going forward. Apple processes enrollments on a rolling basis, and the reduced commission typically takes effect the month after you are approved, so the sooner you do it the sooner the split changes.

The reason this matters is money left uncollected. I have talked to developers who spent a year or more paying 30% while sitting comfortably under the threshold, simply because nobody flipped the switch. If you are not certain whether you are enrolled, check your Agreements, Tax, and Banking section in App Store Connect and confirm the Small Business Program status, rather than assuming. This is the single highest-return five minutes in your App Store Connect account.

What happens when you cross $1 million

The program has a hard edge, and it is worth understanding before you have a big year. If you pass 1 million USD in proceeds during the current calendar year, Apple applies the standard commission rate to your future sales. In Apple's words, once you surpass the threshold, the standard rate applies to sales from that point on.

Read that carefully, because it is a cliff, not a sliding scale. It is prospective, so the sales you made earlier in the year at 15% are not clawed back, but every sale after you cross flips to 30% for the rest of that year. You do not get 15% on the first million and 30% on the rest. You get 15% until you cross, then 30% on everything after, until the year resets.

Requalifying has a lag worth planning around. If your proceeds fall back below 1 million USD in a future calendar year, you can requalify for the 15% commission the year after. So a single big year can push you to 30% for that year and the tail of it, and you return to 15% once a full lower year is behind you. For a growing app hovering near the line, that timing is real money, and it is worth modeling before you assume next year looks like this one.

Apple's 15% versus Google Play's 15%

Both stores now offer a 15% rate for smaller developers, but the mechanics are not identical, and the difference matters if you ship to both.

Apple's Small Business Program is a cliff. You enroll, you pay 15% while under $1 million in proceeds, and the day you cross, your future sales that year move to 30% until the year resets. Google Play graduates differently. It applies its reduced service fee as a per-year tier on the first $1 million of earnings, with the standard rate only on the amount above that, so you keep the lower rate on that first slice no matter how big you get.

Google's exact numbers are their own tangle, because a service fee and a separate billing fee stack, and Google restructured the whole thing again in 2026. I work through all of it in the real math on Google Play's fees. For planning, the structural difference is the part that matters: Apple resets you to 30% for the rest of the year once you pass a million, while Google keeps the reduced rate on your first million every year. If you are comfortably under a million on both stores, you are paying the reduced rate on both, and the difference is academic. If you are scaling past it, model each store separately, because they graduate very differently.

The catch: 15% of a wrong price is still too little

Here is the part that does not fit on Apple's program page. The Small Business Program changes how the pie is split. It does nothing about how big the pie is.

Getting from 30% to 15% means you keep 85% of each sale instead of 70%. That is real, and you should claim it today. But if your price is wrong for the market, you are now keeping 85% of far too little. A $9.99 subscription auto-converted into Indian rupees or Brazilian reais lands at several times the share of local income it takes in the US, which means most people in those markets never buy at all. Cutting your commission does not move that number. The price does.

This is why I treat the two as separate levers that both need pulling. Enroll in the Small Business Program to fix the commission, and localize your prices to fix conversion. A price set with local purchasing power in mind, rather than a raw currency conversion of your base price, is what actually grows the revenue the 15% is a share of. I put the whole system for that into the pillar on app pricing localization, and it is the natural next move once your commission is sorted. Apple also keeps changing the price mechanics underneath you, which I covered in Apple's 2026 pricing and tax changes, so neither lever is set-and-forget.

Claim the 15%, then fix the price

The Apple Small Business Program is the rare piece of App Store housekeeping that pays for itself in minutes. If you earn under $1 million in proceeds a year, and almost every indie does, you should be paying 15%, not 30%. Check your enrollment status in App Store Connect today, accept the agreement if you have not, and stop handing Apple an extra 15 points.

Then do the harder half. A lower commission on an unlocalized price still underperforms in most of the world. PricePush calculates localized pricing for 190+ countries using purchasing-power data and pushes it to both the App Store and Google Play in one step, so the revenue your 15% is a share of is as large as it should be in every market. You can try it free on one app and see your own per-country gap, and plans plus the founding lifetime offer are on the pricing page.