Arbitrary Apple rules. Apple decided that "physical" goods & services in app purchases don't get taxed (e.g., clothes, uber rides). Digital goods do because they feel like they can get away with it which is why you can't buy eBooks from Kobo or Amazon on iOS, can't buy or rent movies from Google on iOS. People will tell you this is for "safety" and to keep you from getting scammed but there's nothing stopping malicious actors from creating apps that promise to ship physical goods and just don't. At least with digital goods you should get whatever you pay for immediately after purchase.
I do wonder if a workaround here is buying a physical postcard from a patreon creator that comes with a free monthly subscription. A 50c mailed card would be cheaper for any subscription above $2.
I'm not sure you'd need to ship it. You're buying a 1/100,000 share of a physical postcard that exists at the Patreon offices. You can visit the office and see the postcard displayed out front under glass. It just so happens that buying such a postcard includes a free month's subscription to a Patreon creator.
In many cases, it isn’t even a “purchase“ in any reasonable sense of the word - it’s a donation. Supporters don’t get anything other than knowing they’re helping a creator keep making something they like. This is akin to Apple wanting a 30% cut when you send your buddy $5 through Apple Pay. With this, Apple isn’t just interfering in business relationships, they’re interfering in personal relationships.
I’ve been pretty sympathetic to Apple in their tangles with the EU - I want my phone to be a locked-down appliance. But this is too far- it’s clear that Apple both has a lot of power and is abusing it.
The line is "can you use the purchase solely in the app distributed through Apple's infrastructure". I think their fee is outrageous, but that does seem like a defensible line.
Except they're stepping far over that line! You can use a Patreon subscription on all platforms, same as a Spotify or Netflix or Kobo... and yet they want a cut even when they have no part in the payment processing. Totally indefensible imo.
No, I think you misunderstand. It's not "can you use it elsewhere?", it's "if the user chose to, could they use the purchase solely inside the context of the Apple ecosystem?"
That is, if someone wants to, they can use Patreon's iOS app, not interact with Patreon in any other way, and get all of the benefits available to patrons.
Whatever you get as a Patreon patron isn't typically a physical product, unlike something you buy on Amazon (generally speaking) or a physical car ride. It's closer to a Netflix or a newspaper subscription, and Apple wants 30% of those too.
> Even if this tiny company somehow became worth a billion dollars, I’d still make less money than if I’d worked as a senior engineer at Google or wherever
this is why they don’t belong in start up land
running and working in a start up requires a certain type of insanity
The OPs complaint is not that the risk is high, the OPs complaint is that the risk relative to their market rate is not balanced. Often you can end up working for junior founders and would be better off as a founder yourself.
If the founder views you as replaceable, then why not work at a big tech which would pay you dramatically more? Successful startups are not often populated by the irrational.
This isn't the founder's risk. It's the employee's risk. And it has the added bonus of, if there is a liquidity event, the employee's don't get the upside.
I was like engineer #3 at a company that eventually was acquired for ~$250MM. My payout was $60,000, after 5 years of employment there. I could have made more by going and contracting at megacorp for a single year. There was never any upside for me.
That was because you negotiated and accepted a shitty deal. Unless someone scammed you into believing something that isnt' true, which I doubt. Founders can be overly optimistic, but it isn't same as scamming.
Startups are a difficult game. Everyone gotta watch for themselves. Don't blame on others if you accepted a suckers deal.
This is not a real risk you're talking about, but small inconveniences. A risk is losing your house for example, or losing the ability to rent.
Inconveniences are part of life anyway. Being the first engineer means you get all these inconveniences (tell your wife and your kids) plus real risks as above (taking a loan to buy the options and losing it)
“Letting people go” is taking on the risk of all of those people being let go losing the ability to rent or pay their mortgages. That seems like more than an inconvenience to me if you take one of the responsibilities of being an employer at all seriously.
If you are working a tech job and know how to program computers and have no savings slash the loss of a job costs you your house, you have deep and fundamental problems far beyond the loss of one job and it isn’t your former employer’s fault that your life is mismanaged.
No employee should join a startup with the expectation that the company will be around forever.
Compare startups to restaurants- their failure rate is absolutely massive. Working for a new company is simply always a risk for everyone involved, there's no getting around that.
My primary motivation as an employee of a startup is fear of personal financial ruin. That the company won't be able to make payroll and I won't be able to pay my rent, that I'll be evicted eventually or that if the company goes under I won't be able to find a new job. There is no mission or any other soft carrot that I care about. I also don't have any faith in stock options.
I can't imagine caring about reputational damage with rich people unless that reputation is in service of not starving in the streets.
Perhaps you shouldn’t be working in a startup because your lifestyle is unaffordable, or your company is paying you peanuts.
I have worked in startups in Silicon Valley and have had many friends working for them. Most startups pay a base salary of around 200k$ I reckon (for new grads, perhaps 150k). This might come down to 9-10k after taxes per month. A good 2 bedroom house to rent in a location like San Jose would be 3k$ per month, which leaves you 6k for other expenses. Assuming 1k for car, you should still have 5k in savings per month, in a year of working you will have saved up 20 months of rent, maybe 12 months of living without a job. I find it hard to believe anyone in SV startups, is in risk of “personal financial ruin”, or “starving in the streets” just because they lost a few months of paychecks while searching for another job. That may be true in another country, in another market, but all tech workers in the Bay Area are living well above subsistence and acting like they are living paycheck to paycheck is a fantasy. There is a cost to working in startups, and it is an opportunity cost of not working in a big tech company and cashing out your 200k+ RSU over 4 years and instead receiving paper money stock options that can be worth 0.
I don't live in California, the startup I work for is remote. I don't fear financial ruin because I don't have money, I fear it because I catastrophize everything. There's no evidence to suggest I would be homeless if I lost my job, but that's just where my brain goes.
But I'd like to point out that in your math, you calculated the cost of a car and a rent, but no other living expenses. Also in what universe does a car cost $1000/month??
Founder or owner I think are the best. President is fine if you have a a couple employees, CEO I'd even be totally fine with for a small company, it just approaches cringy in my book when its founders using a corporate title that usually implies a larger organizational structure and it is really just them (a single person/no employee company).
why do some purchases get exempt and not others?
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