You can now apply for the reduced Google Play service fee for your Android app, slashing the fee Google charges from 30% to 15%… but how do you apply for the reduced fee?
As many of you will have heard, Google have followed Apple in reducing the service fees that they are charging to small businesses, essentially app developers who raise less than $1 million per year through in app purchases. Frustratingly though, developers have to opt-in to the lower charges rather than them being applied automatically. And we’ve had a few clients struggle to find out how to sign up for the lower fees.
So our CTO Tom Colvin has swooped in with a helpful step-by-step guide to signing up for the reduced 15% Google Play Service fee. The video guide is below… along with a helpful transcript of the video.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Transcript
Hello! So Google recently announced they were going to reduce their service fee from 30% to 15% for small businesses. Which, let’s face it, affects almost all of us that are on the Play Store.
And the way that we do this is by setting up an account group. Once we’ve done that, it’s going to ask us about whether we want to enrol for the 15% service fee.
So I have logged into the Google Play Console here. Note you’ll have to log in as the account owner. You can’t be someone who is just associated to the account.
You literally have to be the person for whom the account was set up or by whom the account was set up. Then we click create account group like this. And we create the account group, giving it a group name and I’m going to leave it exactly as it suggests there.
Hit create account group and then at the bottom there pops up a message saying add developer account to the account group so that we know you’re associated to them.
So what Google is trying to do here is find all of the Google Play accounts that might have sort of similar apps. Because what they want to do is bunch all that together and apply that to one single service fee.
Here we click start. In my case there are no other accounts that have sort of similar apps or that are all under the same brand.
So my legal entity doesn’t own any other developer account and I have no accounts with similar brand features. I click save and then this magic box appears here where there is the review and enrol button. I’m going to click that and confirm my terms of service, obviously everybody is going to read this in its entirety. I have already done so. And clicking accept and enrol.
And there we go, we’re enrolled for the 15% service fee.
A few more details!
So a little bit of information on how this works. So every year you get one million dollars, your first million dollars of payments that take place through the app store that are going incur only a 15% service fee.
Google normally takes 30%. So for the first million dollars Google will only take 15%.
The way that works this year is because we are halfway through the year, so this program starts on the 1st of July, so you get half a million dollars this year and they will take only 15% service fee for the first half million dollars.
Come January 2022, it will be 15% for the first million dollars and it will reset every year after that.
I hope that’s all helpful. Let me know in the comments if you need any more help!
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