Do you know many paid readers aren't even using apple devices to read them?
It'll also cost time and effort for Ghost to somehow make Apple pay enabled for an open source platform (Probably a nightmare). Who is going to pay the ghost devs for that.
In the end, substack's biggest advantage is its 10% cut, which is really not much. Any attempt to replicate it will quickly run up into this cost limit.
Apple Pay is different than in-app payments (which are 30%). It’s effectively a client-side protocol for securely providing tokenized payment info [0], and it’s integrated with a long list of e-commerce platforms and payment providers. Generally the commissions involved are the same as for any other credit card (i.e. closer to 3% than 10%).
For example, Stripe [1]:
> Stripe will charge the same rate for processing Apple Pay transactions as we do for all other credit and debit card transactions. There is no additional fee from Apple for Apple Pay transactions.
Speaking as a user, I will always choose Apple Pay when it’s available on a website, even if for no other reason than it means I don’t need to find my wallet and enter my credit card number.
(And Apple Pay was just one example - the same would apply to Google Play, which Stripe also supports.)
I don’t need to enter that for Apple Pay, IIRC? Maybe I do when using it on the web, though. Or I need to do a 3D secure “approve in banking app” flow.
Do you know many paid readers aren't even using apple devices to read them?
It'll also cost time and effort for Ghost to somehow make Apple pay enabled for an open source platform (Probably a nightmare). Who is going to pay the ghost devs for that.
In the end, substack's biggest advantage is its 10% cut, which is really not much. Any attempt to replicate it will quickly run up into this cost limit.