8
4 Comments

How does Apple make money from SaaS products?

Apple sells iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, wearables, and SERVICES.

Apple's services business generates the highest gross margins compared to its products business and Apple has a fast-growing services business.

Here are some services by Apple:

1. Apple Music 🎵

Apple’s music streaming service. It also has playlists by influencers, shows by musicians, and many other social features. It had 98 million (in 2021) subscribers.

How does Apple make money with the App Music?

  • Subscription fees
  • Partnerships

alt text

2. iCloud ☁️

Apple’s own cloud storage service. iCloud has a freemium plan (You get 5 GB for FREE). If you run out of your free iCloud storage you can buy more storage at $$$.

How does Apple make money with iCloud?

  • Subscription fees for add-ons.

alt text

3. AppleTV+ 📺

This is Apple’s own streaming service. They release a new Apple Original every month. It has ~25 million subscribers in March 2022.

Do the math. 💰

How does Apple make money with AppleTv+?

  • Subscription fees

alt text

4. Apple Pay 💳

Apple's instant payment service. Just like the App Store, Apple takes a cut on every transaction that happens on Apple Pay.

How does Apple make money with Apple Pay?

  • Commissions

5. App Store 💻

App Store is a place where you download apps for your Apple devices. App Store is the largest contributor to Apple’s services revenue.

How does Apple make money with the App store?

  • Commissions on subscriptions
  • Paid downloads
  • In-app purchases

Apple's other SaaS products are

Apple books 📖
Podcasts 🎙️
Apple Care+ 🛠️
Apple news 📰
Apple Card 💳, and more.

Thank you for reading.

I have one question for you, What did you learn from the above-mentioned pricing plans? Did you notice any patterns?

posted to Icon for group Software as a Service
Software as a Service
on June 13, 2022
  1. 2

    Great Article team, You’ve done a proper analysis of how apple makes money from saas products based on its highlighted features.

    I like to add some interesting information about how to build Apple TV app development, this will helpful for readers.

    1. 1

      Thank you for sharing

  2. 2

    Subscription model is the best for the SAAS projects and it also works well and provide the high revenue.

Trending on Indie Hackers
Your build-in-public audience is not your market. I learned the difference the slow way. User Avatar 185 comments I built a WhatsApp AI bot for doctors in Peru — launched 3 weeks ago, 0 paying customers, and stuck waiting for Meta to approve my app User Avatar 61 comments Built a "stocks as football cards" thing. 5 days in, my launch tweet got 7 views. What am I missing? User Avatar 33 comments From broke and burned out as a PM, to launching my SaaS and optimizing my health User Avatar 32 comments Why Claude Skills Are Becoming Important for Tech Careers User Avatar 24 comments I kept starting projects and dropping them. So I built a system that wouldn’t let me User Avatar 23 comments