For a decade the mobile subscription business ran on a rule nobody voted for: if you wanted to reach an iPhone or an Android user, you billed through Apple or Google and handed over up to 30% of every payment. That arrangement is now being taken apart by regulators, courts and the developers themselves, which puts subscription payment processing at the centre of the growth conversation.

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Apple's August 2026 changes in the EU are the clearest signal yet that the closed-billing model is ending, and they force a question every subscription business should already be modelling: how much of your revenue belongs on the web, and how much still belongs in the store.

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This guide covers what changed, why businesses are moving revenue to the web, how to decide where each subscriber cohort should be billed, and how to make the move without giving back the margin you set out to capture.

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Regulators Are Dismantling the 30% Commission

On 18 August 2026 Apple announced a single set of EU business terms for developers, effective 1 October 2026, replacing the fragmented model it had operated since the Digital Markets Act took hold. Two structural shifts matter for anyone selling subscriptions.

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First, the Core Technology Fee is gone. The per-install charge Apple introduced in 2024 as its DMA-compliance mechanism has been replaced by a Core Technology Commission of a flat 5% on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store, which swaps a fixed per-install cost that punished high-volume free-to-paid funnels for a revenue-linked charge.

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Second, Apple In-App Purchase and alternative payment options can now co-exist in the same EU app, which was not previously permitted and is the change that makes a genuine mixed model possible.

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The new commission ladder looks like this:

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The reduced rate is not applied by default. A transaction qualifies for it when at least one of these conditions is met:

• the developer is enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program, which covers developers earning under $1M a year in proceeds
• the charge is an auto-renewing subscription in its second year or later, since Apple drops long-held subscriptions to the lower tier
• the app qualifies for a specific programme such as Mini Apps or Video Partner

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That ladder is the product of a multi-year fight that Apple lost in stages. The Digital Markets Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/1925, became applicable in March 2024 and required gatekeepers to allow steering to outside payment, and enforcement moved fast from there:

• March 2024: the EU fines Apple around €1.84bn for anti-steering in music streaming, after Spotify's complaint.
• April 2025: the Commission issues its first DMA fine, €500M against Apple, and a US court strikes down Apple's 27% fee on external purchases.
• August 2026: Apple announces the unified EU terms that take effect on 1 October 2026.

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The pattern is consistent on both sides of the Atlantic, and Britain's CMA reached the same conclusion when it designated Apple and Google with Strategic Market Status in 2025: the anti-steering rules that once made app-store commissions unavoidable are being struck down, and Apple's own August 2026 statement says the new terms resolve its disagreements with the Commission.

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Google is on the same path, having settled an antitrust claim with Match Group in 2023, and from June 2026 it is restructuring Play fees so that routing payments to an external checkout cuts its take to around 10%, down from the 15% to 30% it charged through Google Play Billing.

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Web Billing Keeps Up to 38% More of Every Dollar

App stores take between 15% and 30% of every subscription payment, while web card processing costs a fraction of that, typically around 2.9% plus a small fixed fee. On a $10 subscription, Apple's 30% standard rate leaves the developer $7.00, whereas a 3% web fee leaves about $9.70, which is roughly 38% more retained margin on the same sale. At the 15% tier the gap narrows, but web still keeps meaningfully more of every dollar.

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The prize is large: Appfigures estimates that Apple alone collected more than $10.1bn in US App Store commissions in 2024 and over $27.39bn globally, and the subscription economy was valued at around $492bn in 2024 with double-digit annual growth projected for the decade ahead.

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The businesses acting on that arithmetic are among the largest in the market:

• Spotify removed in-app billing years ago, and after the April 2025 ruling added external payment links in its US app, telling the court its data showed a rise in iOS Premium upgrades.
• Netflix stopped new iOS in-app signups in 2018 and in February 2024 moved its last iTunes-billed subscribers to direct web billing.
• Epic returned Fortnite to the US App Store in May 2025 and now offers 20% back in Epic Rewards when users pay through its own system.

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Scale is the pattern behind these moves. RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026, built on more than 115,000 apps, found that 41% of top-tier apps generate web revenue against just 1.3% of the smallest hobby apps.

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Web does not win on every metric, and being precise about that keeps the case credible. The benchmarks split cleanly:

• Conversion favours the store, since in-app paywalls convert better than web-only flows.
• Long-run retention also favours the store, since in-app subscribers often stay longer, so raw lifetime value can trail even after the commission is stripped out.
• Margin and control favour the web, which is where the real case for moving revenue sits.

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The strongest control advantage is involuntary churn, meaning the revenue lost when a card fails rather than a customer choosing to leave:

• It runs at 24% of overall churn for consumer subscriptions, per Stripe's own benchmarks.
• Payment failures put around $129B of subscription revenue at risk across the industry in 2025, on Recurly's estimate.
• Owning billing is what lets you recover it, through your own retry timing, pre-dunning notices and card-updater services such as Visa Account Updater and Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater, all of which sit with the platform under app-store billing.

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Stores Win Discovery, Web Wins Margin

The old shorthand that web escapes the 30% cut no longer holds under the new EU rules, so a serious strategy starts from what each channel actually does well.

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The saving depends heavily on how long a subscriber has been paying, because that sets the in-app rate you are comparing web against. A year-one subscriber is billed at the 26% standard rate, so moving that cohort to web captures close to the full gap down to roughly 3% processing. A second-year subscriber already sits at the 15% reduced rate, so a 15% link-out saves little over staying in-app. The margin case is therefore strongest on year-one subscribers and high-ARPU annual plans, and thin on long-held subscribers.

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One caution before going all-in on web: if annual ARPU is below roughly $60 and you cannot identify a distinct web audience, vendor data suggests a forced web-to-app funnel can lose more in conversion than it saves in fees.

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Combining the two channels is now possible in the EU, where a developer can offer Apple In-App Purchase alongside alternative processing and web link-out in the same app. The catch is that payment options must be selected and held for 12 months, so the blend is a planning decision rather than a monthly dial.

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A blended model also has to be executed across in-app purchase, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and direct debit, in several currencies, on cycles you may want to change, which is where a subscription payment gateway earns its place. COLIBRIX ONE recurring payments runs fixed, usage-based and hybrid billing through a single API and lets you adjust cycles and amounts on demand, while accepting Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA and ACH across the US, UK and Europe, so the mix you commit to for the year is one you can actually operate.