> It's worth pointing articles like this whenever the Apple haters berate Apple's "greedy" 30% cut. Particularly when you only spend, say, $1-3 at a time, the fees take up most of that.
I think the greedy part is more based on Apple's requirement that you use their system (and thus pay their 30% vig). If it was voluntary I don't think people would care too much about how big of a cut they took because you could always try and do better on your own.
At least for me, this is absolutely the case. I'm perfectly hapy to pay 30% to a payment processor for small-ticket items, and consider it a good deal.
But the problem comes in when I don't have a choice to run big-ticket items through Braintree, and there's no way for another company to provide a competing small-ticket gateway. In the long-run, that looks too much like a distributor model, which never worked out well for musicians.
I think the greedy part is more based on Apple's requirement that you use their system (and thus pay their 30% vig). If it was voluntary I don't think people would care too much about how big of a cut they took because you could always try and do better on your own.