What just happened? Amazon has announced a new program designed to help small developers get their feet under them. It follows in the footsteps of companies like Epic, Apple and Google, which have rolled out similar dev-friendly revenue split programs in recent memory.
Under the Amazon Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program, developers who earned less than $1 million in revenue in the previous calendar year will qualify for an 80/20 revenue share by default. This means that Amazon will lower its cut from 30 percent to 20 percent, but that's not all.
Amazon further noted that it will provide AWS promotional credits in an amount equivalent to 10 percent of revenue and will be valid for up to 12 months from the date they were issued.
Fully utilizing both offers, one could say that Amazon is effectively lowering its cut down to just 10 percent overall.
The usefulness of those AWS credits will vary depending on the developer, although Amazon cited recent survey data claiming 94 percent of devs use cloud services during the app development process.
Epic got the ball rolling in this category in late 2018 with the launch of its Epic Games Store and a developer-friendly revenue split that let devs keep 88 percent of their earnings. Apple in 2020 trimmed App Store commission fees to 15 percent for devs that make less than $1 million annually. Google followed suit a few months later, announcing it would be cutting fees in half (from 30 percent to 15 percent) for the first $1 million in revenue earned by devs each year.
Amazon's new program starts in the fourth quarter of this year, we're told.
Image credit dennizn, Michael Vi