The Epic v. Apple ruling in April 2025 did something nobody expected Apple to accept quietly: it forced the App Store to allow external purchase links in US iOS apps at 0% commission. Apple's response was to charge a 27% commission on those external transactions. On paper that is three points below the 30% IAP rate. In practice it ran higher: a developer using an external link still had to pay their own payment processor on top of Apple's cut, so the all-in cost landed at or above 30%. Almost no one opted in, and the court found the fee had a prohibitive effect and held Apple in contempt. Then Fortnite came back to iOS. Then Apple filed a stay request. The legal situation is still moving, but as of mid-2026 the 0% ruling holds and US founders are running live experiments on whether leaving Apple's payment rails actually makes financial sense.
The answer is not obvious. Apple's fee dropping to zero is one number. The costs that replace it are several, and they belong to you now.
This piece runs the full cost stack for each US path – Apple IAP, in-app external purchase link, and Web2App – on a $20 per month subscription. It includes payment processing, US sales tax exposure, chargebacks, and the conversion gap that most fee comparisons quietly ignore.
The three US paths, side by side
Path | Apple fee | You become seller of record? | What that adds |
|---|---|---|---|
Apple IAP | 15% to 30% | No | Nothing. Apple handles billing, tax, and disputes. |
In-app external purchase link | 0% (post-Epic ruling) | Yes | Payment processing, sales tax, disputes, Apple compliance UX |
Web2App | 0% | Yes | Payment processing, sales tax, disputes |
The EU has the Digital Markets Act tiering the external link fee into Tier 1 and Tier 2 brackets. The US has none of that structure – the external link ruling simply removes Apple's commission. That makes the US math look simpler at the top. It also means founders carry the full seller-of-record burden with no Apple infrastructure underneath.
What Apple charges on each US path
Apple IAP is unchanged by the Epic ruling. You pay 15% if you qualify for the Small Business Program (under one million dollars in annual proceeds, across all your apps) or if a subscription has cleared its first year. Standard rate is 30%. Apple handles the checkout, sales tax collection and remittance, chargebacks, and refunds. Nothing shifts to you.
In-app external purchase link now carries 0% Apple commission in the US, following the court's contempt ruling against Apple's earlier fee structure. The same ruling killed the scare screen. Apple had been showing a full-screen warning that the user was leaving for an external site and that Apple was not responsible for it, and the court found it was built to discourage external purchases rather than inform. Apple can now only show a neutral message, along the lines of "Open in Safari? You will leave the app and go to the developer's website," with Cancel and Open buttons. What it kept is control over presentation: font size, button size, placement, and a rule that the external link cannot be more prominent than the IAP option. Note that Europe did not move with the US here. The EU disclosure sheet survives under the DMA, so guides written for a European audience often describe friction a US app no longer has.
Web2App sidesteps all of this. The purchase happens on the web before the user opens the app, so no in-app link is involved and Apple's purchase framework does not apply. No entitlement, no scare screen, no Apple reporting. The acquisition funnel runs on the open web.
What you pay on top of Apple's 0%
When you move off Apple IAP, Apple stops being your merchant of record. Three cost lines move onto your stack: payment processing, US sales tax, and disputes.
Payment processing
Stripe's standard US rate is 2.9% plus $0.30 per successful online card transaction. That is the base rate, not the full cost. A subscription business typically adds Stripe Billing at 0.7% of billing volume and Stripe Tax at 0.5% for rate calculation, which puts the realistic all-in closer to 4.1% plus $0.30 before disputes. International cards add another 1.5%, and currency conversion 1% on top of that.
US sales tax
This is where most comparisons gloss over the real complexity. The EU has VAT: one framework, one OSS filing, a standard rate per member state. The US is more fragmented, with more than 13,000 tax jurisdictions across the 45 states that enforce economic nexus, each with its own rates, definitions, and filing schedules.
The 2018 Supreme Court ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair established economic nexus, meaning you owe sales tax in a state once your sales there cross a threshold, even with no physical presence. The thresholds are not uniform and they have been moving. Most states sit at $100,000 in annual in-state sales, but California, Texas and New York are at $500,000. Many states originally paired the revenue test with a 200-transaction trigger, which caught low-priced subscriptions long before they earned six figures in a state. That test is being repealed: as of 2026 most states have dropped it and gone revenue-only, with Kentucky removing its transaction threshold in August 2026. If you are working from a guide written before 2025, assume the thresholds in it are wrong.
Then there is the question of whether your product is taxable at all. Some states exempt SaaS entirely. Some tax it as prewritten software. Some tax it as a digital service at a different rate. Texas and New York treat the same product differently. Sell to customers in California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois and you are navigating five definitions of what you sell and five answers on whether it is taxable.
Under Apple IAP, Apple is the seller of record and handles all of this. Under an external path, you do, or you pay someone to.
Chargebacks and disputes
Apple IAP absorbs these. External paths do not. A workable baseline for a subscription SaaS is 0.5% to 1% of revenue in dispute losses, on top of Stripe's $15 fee per dispute, which is charged regardless of whether you win. Contesting a dispute you lose can cost more than the fee alone.
Worked example: $20 per month US subscription
These figures use mid-2026 rates. The Apple external link ruling is under active appeal, and the US terms may change.
Apple IAP, standard rate
Apple fee: 30% = $6.00
Tax, disputes, processing: Apple handles
Net to founder: ~$14.00
Apple IAP, Small Business Program
Apple fee: 15% = $3.00
Net to founder: ~$17.00
In-app external purchase link (0% Apple fee)
Apple fee: $0
Stripe processing (2.9% + $0.30): $0.88
Sales tax compliance: depends on your nexus footprint; using a tool like TaxJar or Avalara adds $0.05 to $0.15 per transaction in tool cost, plus your own filing or accountant overhead
Dispute reserve: ~$0.10 to $0.20
Scare-screen conversion impact: not a transaction cost, but a revenue reduction. At a 15% drop on users who click through to the external link, you recover less total revenue than the fee math suggests. This is the number to model, not estimate.
Net to founder (before tax and conversion adjustment): ~$18.80 to $19.00
Web2App, DIY stack
Apple fee: $0
Stripe processing: $0.88
Sales tax tooling and compliance: same as above; the exposure is broader because the web funnel reaches all US states from day one
Dispute reserve: ~$0.10 to $0.20
Conversion gap vs Apple IAP: real, but self-contained to your own checkout UX – no Apple scare screen. Depends entirely on your checkout design and how many stored-credential users you have.
Net to founder (before tax risk): ~$18.80 to $19.00
Web2App via merchant of record
A merchant of record takes on the seller-of-record position, folding payment processing, sales tax collection and remittance, and dispute handling into one rate. You pay one number; they carry the liability.
tiun, for example, quotes an all-in rate of approximately 3.4% plus $0.30 on a US subscription. On $20 that is roughly $0.98, for a net of approximately $19.02. That figure includes sales tax handling and dispute coverage – the two lines the DIY calculation above does not.
The operational gap between DIY and MoR widens as your US revenue scales. A founder with $50,000 in monthly US revenue crossing nexus thresholds in 15 states is not solving a math problem anymore – they are solving a compliance operations problem. The MoR rate buys the answer to that problem, not just the payment.
Where the full-stack numbers land
$20 subscription, mid-2026 US rates:
Path | Apple cut | Full stack cost | Net retained |
|---|---|---|---|
Apple IAP (standard) | $6.00 | $6.00 | ~$14.00 |
Apple IAP (Small Business) | $3.00 | $3.00 | ~$17.00 |
External link (0% Apple) | $0 | ~$1.00 to $1.50 | ~$18.50 to $19.00 |
Web2App, DIY | $0 | ~$1.00 to $1.50 | ~$18.50 (pre-tax risk) |
Web2App, MoR (tiun) | $0 | ~$0.98 | ~$19.02 |
The headline net retention on Web2App and external links is similar. The difference is in what stays off the table: Web2App has no scare screen and no Apple compliance entanglement. The external link has in-app discoverability but the Apple-mandated UX friction and the ongoing legal uncertainty.
The conversion gap nobody prices in
Every published comparison of Apple IAP versus external checkout focuses on the fee. The number most founders underestimate is what happens to conversion after you move payment off Apple's rails.
Apple IAP runs through Face ID or Touch ID with stored credentials. The checkout takes two taps. It runs inside the app with no context switch. Users in the US are comfortable with it – it is the default they have used for years.
Web checkout introduces a browser redirect, a new payment form, and for most users a fresh card entry. An external link in-app adds the Apple scare screen before any of that. Published ranges from founders who have run A/B tests on this vary widely by category, but a 10 to 20% lower conversion on external checkout versus Apple IAP is a commonly cited range. The fee saving on a $20 subscription is roughly $3 to $6 depending on your IAP tier. If one in eight users drops at the checkout switch, the net revenue per acquisition can move against you even with a lower fee.
This does not mean Web2App or external links are wrong. It means the right comparison is not fee percentage versus fee percentage. It is fee percentage at your conversion rate versus Apple's fee at Apple's conversion rate. That is a product and data question, not a fee table question.
The legal uncertainty, named plainly
The US 0% commission on external links is a live court remedy, not a settled Apple policy, and the courts have already said it will not stay at zero.
Here is where the case actually stands as of August 2026. In April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in willful contempt of her 2021 injunction and barred it from charging any commission on external-link purchases. In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the contempt finding and most of that order, but held the blanket ban on commissions was too broad. It ruled Apple may charge a fee covering costs genuinely and reasonably necessary for coordinating external-link purchases, and sent the case back to Rogers to set the rate. In May 2026 the Supreme Court declined to pause the contempt order. On June 30, 2026 it agreed to hear Apple's appeal on the narrow question of whether the contempt finding was proper, with argument expected in the term beginning in October.
The remand is stalled. Apple asked Rogers to pause the rate proceedings until the Supreme Court rules. Epic opposed in July, arguing a rate has to be set regardless of the outcome and that delay could push a decision into 2027. Until that proceeding concludes, the US external-link commission stays at 0% by operation of the current order.
What that means for planning is more specific than general uncertainty. Zero is a floor that an appeals court has already called overbroad. The realistic outcomes are a low single-digit coordination fee, or a return to something closer to Apple's original number if the Supreme Court unwinds the contempt finding. If your model assumes 0% holds indefinitely, you are not modelling a risk, you are modelling an outcome the Ninth Circuit has already ruled out. Build the funnel so a commission of a few percent does not break the unit economics.
Web2App does not carry this specific risk. The purchase happens on the open web, outside Apple's in-app purchase framework, and Apple has never claimed a commission on a transaction that begins and ends off-device. Its cost structure does not depend on how Rogers sets a number.
What this comparison does not settle
This piece covers transaction cost. Two things it does not.
Acquisition cost. Leaving Apple's in-app purchase puts you on the open web, where you run your own funnel. Customer acquisition on the web typically costs more than App Store conversion, which is comparatively passive. The full unit economics, cost per acquired customer across the whole funnel rather than per transaction, change when you leave Apple's distribution.
Build cost. Web2App requires a web checkout and a credentialing flow that hands off to the app. An external link additionally requires Apple's external purchase entitlement, the StoreKit disclosure integration, and monthly transaction reporting to Apple. None of it is free to build or maintain.
Frequently asked questions
Does the 0% Apple commission on external links apply to all US app developers?
As of mid-2026, yes – the contempt ruling applies to iOS apps distributed on the US App Store. But the ruling is under appeal, and Apple's compliance with the spirit of the ruling is under scrutiny. Apple still controls the scare-screen UX requirement and can revise its guidelines within the bounds of the court order. Treat the 0% as current, not permanent.
Do I owe US sales tax if I use Web2App?
You owe sales tax in any US state where you have crossed economic nexus thresholds, regardless of which payment path you use. Nexus is triggered by your sales volume, not by whether you use Apple IAP or your own checkout. Under Apple IAP, Apple handles collection and remittance because they are the seller of record. Under Web2App, you are, and the obligation is yours – either directly or through a merchant of record that takes on that liability.
Is the conversion gap between Apple IAP and external checkout real, and how large is it?
It is real in most categories. The honest answer on magnitude is that it varies significantly by app type, audience, price point, and checkout design. Apps with a strong brand and high purchase intent show smaller gaps. Apps that depend on impulse purchases or low-friction conversion show larger ones. The Apple scare screen on in-app external links adds a step that Web2App does not have, which is why the conversion profiles of the two external paths are not identical. Run your own test if you can – aggregate ranges (10 to 20%) are real but they are not your number.
What is the difference between Web2App and an in-app external purchase link?
Web2App means the user pays on the web, before or separate from using the app. The app authenticates them and gives access. No in-app link initiates the payment, so Apple's purchase rules and fee framework do not apply at all.
An in-app external purchase link means the user is inside the app, taps a link, sees Apple's required disclosure screen, and is redirected to a web checkout. The purchase still happens on the web, but the link that sends them there lives in the app – and that is what brings it under Apple's compliance requirements (entitlement, disclosure sheet, transaction reporting). Post-Epic ruling in the US, the Apple fee on those transactions is 0%, but the compliance structure remains.