The first time money appears in App Store Connect, almost none of it means what it looks like. Here is what each figure is, how to check your own commission rate without trusting anyone, and why your balance can sit there for months.
Price is not proceeds
The number a customer pays and the number you earn differ by two deductions, applied in this order:
- Local taxes come off first. Apple acts as merchant of record in most territories, so VAT or sales tax is removed before anything is split.
- Apple's commission is taken from what remains.
This ordering is why a naive calculation never matches. If you compute commission against the sticker price you will always be wrong, and you will always conclude Apple took more than it did.
Verify your own commission rate
You do not have to take anyone's word for which rate you are on. Divide proceeds by the post-tax price on a single transaction:
proceeds / (price - tax) ≈ 0.85 → Small Business Program (15%)
proceeds / (price - tax) ≈ 0.70 → standard rate (30%)We ran this on our own sales and got a ratio just above 0.85, confirming the Small Business Program rate. The programme applies to developers under one million dollars in proceeds per calendar year, and it is not automatic — you have to enrol.
The threshold that holds your money
Apple does not pay out any balance below a minimum threshold, and that threshold varies by region and payment method. Below it, the balance rolls forward every month as Balance Carried Forward and nothing is transferred.
This surprises people with a portfolio of free apps and modest in-app revenue: the dashboard shows real earnings, month after month, and the bank account shows nothing. Nothing is wrong. The money is simply queued until it clears the threshold.
Timing: later than you think
Payment follows the fiscal month, not the calendar month, and the fiscal calendar does not line up with a normal one. After a fiscal month closes, payment lands roughly a month later.
Practically, a sale in the middle of a month is money you see in your account around six weeks afterwards — assuming the balance is over the threshold. If it is not, the wait is however long it takes to get there.
What this means if you are starting out
Two consequences worth planning around.
First, you cannot spend App Store earnings on App Store advertising in any useful timeframe. The money is not liquid; ad spend is. Budget them separately.
Second, portfolio breadth does not solve monetisation. We shipped 44 apps and the honest lesson is that the number of apps was never the constraint — pricing and in-app purchase design were. Ten apps that ask for money clearly will out-earn forty that do not.