The Storefront Tax on Your Own Subscriptions: When Paying on the Web Costs Less

The same subscription now carries two prices depending on where you pressed subscribe, and on the listings we checked the app-store route is up to 35% more expensive for identical access. YouTube Premium is $15.99 a month on the web and $20.99 through Apple's billing. Tidal Individual is $11.99 and $15.49. Nothing about the service differs. Only the till does.

This is new enough that most people have never been asked to choose. For most of the App Store's life, developers were forbidden from even mentioning that a cheaper price existed elsewhere. That prohibition is gone on the US storefront, and constrained in the EU, which is why apps have started showing you two numbers and letting you pick.

Last reviewed: September 12, 2026. Method: for each service we read the in-app subscription prices Apple publishes on its own App Store product listing, then read the same plan's price on the service's own pricing page, and calculated the difference. Prices are US storefront and pre-sales-tax. Store price tiers change without notice — re-check both numbers before you move anything.

Why One Subscription Suddenly Has Two Prices

Two things changed, in two jurisdictions, for different reasons.

The United States. Apple's App Review Guidelines still ban buttons, external links and other calls to action that steer customers away from in-app purchase — with one carve-out. Section 3.1.1(a) now reads: "These entitlements are not required for developers to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action in their United States storefront apps." That sentence exists because of the Epic v. Apple injunction. Spotify submitted an updated iOS app carrying external payment links on 1 May 2025, the day after the ruling. What that link-out costs the developer is still open: the Ninth Circuit held in December 2025 that Apple may charge a reasonable commission and sent the rate back to the district court, and Apple proposed up to 15% in August 2026. Until a number is set, a US link-out carries no Apple commission, and that is the window the current web prices sit in.

Google Play, also in the US. Following the Epic v. Google injunction, Google published a policy update for developers serving users in the US that took effect on 29 October 2025: it will not require Google Play Billing, will not prohibit other in-app payment methods, and will not block developers from telling users about prices outside Play or linking them to an external transaction. Developers in the external content links and alternative billing programs begin reporting those transactions and paying the associated service fees on 1 October 2026. That is the date worth watching, because a fee a developer starts paying is a fee that can reappear in a price.

The European Union. Here the pressure is regulatory rather than judicial. Under the Digital Markets Act, gatekeepers must let developers tell customers about offers outside the store; the Commission fined Apple €500 million on 23 April 2025 for breaching exactly that anti-steering obligation. Apple's EU business terms are mid-transition: from 1 October 2026 a single set of terms replaces the old ones, charging 26% on Apple in-app purchases, 20% on alternative in-app payment processing, and 15% on out-of-app offers reached through an actionable link — with only sales made within seven days of the link tap counted.

Read those three numbers together and the mechanism is obvious. The store charges less for a sale it merely referred than for a sale it processed, so the referred price can be lower. That is the whole story of the price gap.

The Gap, Priced

Apple prints the in-app purchase prices on the App Store product page of any app that sells subscriptions through in-app purchase, which makes the comparison reproducible: read the listing, read the service's pricing page, subtract. The last column below is the price the developer would have to charge in-app to net exactly what it nets on the web, given Apple's standard first-year split. Apple's own subscriptions documentation states it plainly: "During a subscriber's first year of service, you receive 70% of the subscription price at each billing cycle," rising to 85% after a year of paid service.

YouTube's in-app prices come straight from the App Store listing for the YouTube app, which shows YouTube Premium at $20.99 and YouTube Premium Family at $34.99. The web prices are the ones YouTube moved to in its 2026 US increase, announced in April and applied to existing subscribers from their June 2026 bill. Tidal's App Store listing shows Individual at $15.49 and Family at $26.99; the web figures are the ones on our Tidal price page, checked against tidal.com on 26 August 2026. Spotify sells no subscription inside its iOS app at all — it prices and links out instead, which is the purest form of the same choice.

Two findings worth pulling out of that table. First, the annual number is the one that matters: a $5 monthly difference reads as noise and spends as $60. Second, every in-app price we checked sits below full pass-through. If a developer simply recovered Apple's 30% cut, the YouTube Premium in-app price would be $22.84, not $20.99. The gap you pay is real, but it is smaller than the store's commission — the developer is absorbing part of it, and Apple's fixed price tiers force the rest into a .99 ending.

How Much of the In-App Figure Is Tax? None of It

The most common explanation people give themselves for the gap is tax, and it is wrong. In the US, both figures are pre-tax: Apple adds state sales tax at purchase where it applies, and so does a web merchant, at the same rate, on the same purchase, to the same buyer. Tax is symmetric. It cannot produce an asymmetric price.

The same holds in reverse for VAT markets, where App Store prices and web prices are both quoted VAT-inclusive at the identical rate. Whichever side of the Atlantic you are on, subtract tax from both numbers and the gap survives intact, because the gap is a distribution fee, not a levy.

Which also explains why the gap moves when policy moves rather than when tax rates move. From 1 October 2026 the EU numbers are 26% on a sale Apple processes in-app against 15% on a sale Apple only referred through an actionable link. Those eleven points are the arithmetic behind every European price gap, and they change on a regulatory date while nothing about the service changes at all.

Where the Gap Is Zero — and Where It Runs the Other Way

An article that only shows the gaps is selling you something. We checked the App Store listings for several other services in our database against their own web pricing, and found no difference at all:

• Crunchyroll. Fan $9.99, Mega Fan $13.99, Ultimate Fan $17.99 — the App Store listing carries the same three figures Crunchyroll moved to in its February 2026 US increase, so the channel buys you nothing here.
• Headspace. $12.99 a month and $69.99 a year, and the App Store listing quotes the same two numbers.
• Strava. $11.99 a month and $79.99 a year on strava.com, and the US App Store listing carries the same pair.

There is a third category that is more interesting than either: the store is not always the more expensive till. Calm's US App Store listing carries Calm Premium annual tiers at $69.99 and at $79.99 at the same time, while the listing's own description quotes $69.99 a year. More than one live annual tier is what a grandfathered price looks like from the outside: some store subscribers are holding a number a new subscriber is never shown, and cancelling to re-buy anywhere would forfeit it. Apple's 12-month commitment subscriptions point the same way — they let a developer charge less per month inside the store in exchange for a year of payments, and Apple's announcement says the option is available worldwide with the exception of the United States and Singapore.

Then there are the services where the comparison cannot be made at all. Duolingo does not put a plan-and-price table on an open page the way YouTube and Tidal do; the number reaches you inside the app or after you sign in. When a service will not quote a price you can hold up against another, treat the in-app figure as a ceiling rather than a reference, and look at what the web checkout offers you before you let it renew.

Switching, in the Order That Works

This is the part nobody documents, and it is the part where money gets lost. There are two viable sequences and one expensive mistake.

The sequence that costs nothing: cancel first, migrate on the expiry date

Cancelling a storefront subscription does not switch anything off. Google states it directly: "When you cancel a subscription, you'll still be able to use your subscription for the time you've already paid." YouTube's own cancellation page for Apple-billed memberships says the same: "Your YouTube paid member benefits will continue until the end of the billing period."

So cancel in the storefront today, note the paid-through date, put a reminder two days before it, and subscribe on the web on that date. You never overlap, you never gap, and you never pay twice. The only thing this sequence demands is that the reminder actually fires — so set it on the calendar you actually read, not the one you keep meaning to.

The sequence that costs one overlap: subscribe first, then cancel

If you do not trust yourself with a reminder, or the service ties a library or a streak to continuous membership, start web billing now, confirm the charge landed, then cancel in the storefront. The cost is the unused remainder of the storefront period you already paid for. On a $20.99 monthly subscription cancelled at the halfway mark, that is about $10 — real money, but bounded and known in advance.

The mistake: subscribe on the web and leave the storefront one running

This is not a small overlap. It is two live subscriptions renewing forever on two different rails, and neither party will notice for you. YouTube maintains a dedicated help page on managing duplicate Premium subscriptions, which tells you that a subscription bought through Apple or Google Play has to be cancelled through that provider — Google cannot switch it off from its side.

What makes this failure so durable is that the two charges do not look alike on a statement. The storefront one posts under the store's own descriptor rather than the service's name, so it reads as an unrelated app purchase; the web one posts under the merchant. Our decoder for unfamiliar recurring billing descriptors covers exactly this pattern, and if you are already staring at two charges for one service, which duplicate to cancel without losing your library is the specific follow-up.

One more ordering trap: cancel through the storefront, not by deleting the app and not through the merchant's own cancel button. If you cannot find where a subscription lives, our iPhone subscription audit walks the Apple ID list screen by screen; on Android the equivalent lives under Payments and subscriptions in the Play Store.

What You Give Up by Leaving the Storefront

Every article about this topic stops at the saving. The store is not charging a toll for nothing; it is charging for a set of services you have been using without pricing. Here is the honest ledger.

Apple's refund path is a genuine asset: requesting a refund through reportaproblem.apple.com is one form, reviewed centrally, for every purchase on the account. A web merchant's refund policy is a page you have to read and an inbox you have to argue with.

The ledger also runs the other way on one line people rarely check. Some in-app features are worse. YouTube's support page states flatly that "Pausing and resuming your paid membership is not available to users who are billed through Apple" — so an Apple-billed YouTube subscriber cannot use the pause that a web subscriber can. We audited which services offer a real billing pause at all in our pause-versus-cancel service audit, and pause is rare enough that losing it to a billing channel matters.

Is It Worth Switching?

Run the annual gap against the friction, not the monthly gap against your patience.

• Gap above roughly $50 a year, and you keep the service indefinitely. Switch. Two YouTube Premium Family subscribers moving to web billing recover $96 a year between them, which is more than most people save by cancelling something they mildly enjoy.
• Gap under $25 a year, and you share the subscription through Family Sharing. Stay. You would be trading a working sharing arrangement for pocket change.
• You expect to cancel within a few months. Stay. One-tap storefront cancellation is worth more than a partial-year saving, and it is the cancellation you will actually perform.
• You are already mid-argument about a charge. Finish it before moving. Switching channels mid-dispute hands both parties a reason to point at the other.
• The service just raised its price. Check both channels before you renew. An increase is announced per channel, lands on different dates on different rails, and is the one moment a service actively invites you to reconsider the plan — which makes it the cheapest possible time to also reconsider the till.

Whichever way you go, the thing to write down is the channel. A subscription's price is a fact about the service; its billing channel is a fact about how you will cancel it, where its receipts arrive, what descriptor it prints on your statement, and whether a refund is one form or one argument. SubBuddy is a manual tracker with no bank connection, which in this specific case is the point: the channel is something you know and the bank feed does not, so you record it once and every future audit starts from the right storefront.

Sources and Scope

• Apple App Review Guidelines — section 3.1.1(a) and the United States storefront carve-out for external links and calls to action.
• Apple: auto-renewable subscriptions — the 70% first-year and 85% post-first-year developer split behind the pass-through column.
• Google Play: policy update for developers serving US users — external links, alternative billing, and the reporting and fee dates.
• YouTube: cancelling a membership billed by Apple — access to the end of the billing period, and pause being unavailable on Apple billing.
• YouTube on the US App Store — the published in-app purchase prices used in the table.
• Apple: request a refund — the storefront refund route you give up when you move to web billing.
• Apple: the DMA and apps in the EU — the 26%, 20% and 15% commissions that take effect on 1 October 2026.
• YouTube: managing duplicate memberships — why a storefront subscription can only be cancelled in that storefront.
• Google Play: cancel, pause or change a subscription — the sentence confirming access runs to the end of the period you have paid for.
• TechCrunch, 14 August 2026 — Apple's proposed commission of up to 15% on US link-out purchases, still before the district court.
• Apple Developer news: monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment — the worldwide availability note excluding the United States and Singapore.

Scope: US storefront prices, read on the dates stated, for the plans named. This post prices a billing channel, not a service. For any single service's full plan list, price history and cancellation steps, use its guide page — YouTube Premium is the one most affected by everything above.