Apple bets cheaper AI will woo small developers

6/9/2026 at 12:12:47 AM

Cheaper isn't as much of a problem as functional.

by Grimblewald

6/9/2026 at 4:13:53 AM

I think precisely the opposite: the marginal value of expensive models is quite small.

by throwaway27448

6/9/2026 at 5:14:19 AM

If I were to guess, cheaper in this context is being used by Apple to catch up to having an AI product with a real moat.

And, of course, Apple’s best moat is the App Store.

The other competitors have their coding and productivity software, all the stuff they built around their models.

Apple doesn’t really have much of that and I think this is essentially their only hope to gain some B2B revenue from AI.

by Grombobulous

6/9/2026 at 3:54:53 AM

I mean, yeah, if it doesn't work at all nobody will use it. But the big players are spending $1k/mo.+ on AI at this point. That's obviously out of reach for many.

by emodendroket

6/9/2026 at 7:13:56 AM

[flagged]

by hanzeweiasa

6/9/2026 at 1:37:45 AM

What is the target to write for is the key aspect here. Not sure there is enough on the phone for developers to create new experiences. I fear all of them are going to try to automate everything on the phone for the user. Not sure what value that provides. May be I am overly skeptical , let’s see

by yalogin

6/9/2026 at 4:04:15 AM

Maybe I'm a "simple" user but I honestly can't think of anything I'd need automated on my phone that I haven't already automated myself with shortcuts. It's first and foremost a communication device, and I don't need AI automation to reply to my messages or emails for me, nor do I necessarily want purchases/ordering things automated either.

The personal context/search stuff is nice, but that's first party now so yeah, not much room for new experiences.

by thewebguyd

6/9/2026 at 8:20:23 AM

the small developers eager to pay the Apple tax! I wonder what the theoretical size of this set is.

by bryanrasmussen

6/9/2026 at 8:26:53 AM

I run a company of 4 people (including myself) and the "apple tax" (if by that you mean the price premium of macs and iphones vs PC and android) is a tiny fraction (borderline rounding error) of my budget.

by ido

6/9/2026 at 8:32:00 AM

Apple tax generally refers to the 30% cut on app and in-app sales.

by trvz

6/9/2026 at 9:23:39 AM

It's 15% for small developers

by NietTim

6/9/2026 at 10:30:48 AM

the 15% rate only applies to the first $1 million in proceeds, it does not work like a permanent tax bracket

by paulatreides

6/9/2026 at 11:20:02 AM

Yes, small developers.

by NietTim

6/9/2026 at 2:03:52 PM

Apple doing their best to keep "small developers" small, since the catch is that in the following year, because those "small" devs exceeded the $1 million mark even temporary, just once, will be disqualified from the Small Business Program for the entirety of the next calendar year. They will pay the standard 30% commission on all earnings from the very first dollar.

The emergence of this SBP was due to pressure from looming anti-trust measures anyway, which Apple would have never willingly conceded without it.

by paulatreides

6/9/2026 at 10:05:01 AM

once the 8 or 9 figure bills for openai & anthropic tokens arrive we can review this topic.

by blitzar

6/9/2026 at 11:38:34 AM

I think Apple should do niche AI as in all these companies run LLM on their infrastructure and Apple should focus on running light LLMs on their devices which are capable of doing so.

This means it would be cheap for the end user and they could sell their "privacy" by saying that the user's communication never leaves their devices

by krisknez

6/9/2026 at 12:09:10 PM

See Gemma 4 Edge models like gemma4:e2b

by cwmoore

6/9/2026 at 5:16:12 AM

I haven’t been able to find a cost for larger developers. Is that published yet?

Their presentations talked about how it was based on the user’s quota, with higher quotas for iCloud+ subscribers.

by e28eta

6/9/2026 at 12:03:44 AM

Reading the title I had a very different notion of what to expect. The article has something completely different. I was hoping this would be something for indie app devs.

by thallavajhula

6/9/2026 at 2:23:21 AM

uhh isn't it basically free access to API if your apps are less than 2 million downloads?

by blobbers

6/9/2026 at 2:26:19 AM

Before opening the link I thought they were reducing the cost per token.

This smells more like a get you hooked and then crank the costs.

Not that I'd be any less skeptical of the first option. We've already seen providers reduce quotas and raise prices.

by hdjrudni

6/9/2026 at 3:34:34 AM

but these "free" tokens take up an end user's daily free quota, after which a user needs to pay. ?

by stevenwireless

6/9/2026 at 7:55:21 AM

Wait, Apple is charging infrastructure fees? Since when, or are they just introducing new fees for those with over 2 million first-time downloads?

by LoganDark

6/9/2026 at 9:22:54 AM

Can't wait to try it. Made a small log app for my IBS which allows free text input and uses LLM to create JSON. If that could be done on device with a foundation model, it would be awesome. (and also completely bomb my income model)

by NietTim

6/9/2026 at 12:56:58 PM

I think that can pretty realistically be done with Gemma or Qwen, although maybe with some delay. They run great on android in the Edge Gallery app.

Further, you could allow for voice input by running whisper STT locally, then doing a small context-aware correction pass with Gemma or Qwen to correct words it got wrong.

by sureglymop

6/9/2026 at 2:20:55 PM

The issue with those solutions is that it would balloon my app size because I'd need to embed the model, or add a mechanism to download the models afterwards, for something that is essentially a note taking app. But maybe I can make it an option and word it effectively, that is an idea! Your idea for doing a context aware correction pass on STT is very interesting and something I hadn't thought of yet. Thank you for your thoughts!

by NietTim

6/9/2026 at 2:38:03 AM

Is this more scraping at the bottom of the barrel?

I get it. So many tech companies built their platforms around people submitting their work for sale. Now that things have cooled down they're desperate. This is exactly like what happened to the music and movie industries.

If they want to make money they must take bigger creative risks. AI is the exact opposite of that because it's trained on what's already been done.

by sublinear

6/9/2026 at 3:31:45 AM

[dead]

by gedItRite

6/8/2026 at 11:49:01 PM

Small developers: "Your $99/year tithe has cost me thousands of dollars to provide basic support for your ecosystem."

Apple: "Did somebody say 'we want cheaper AI'?"

by bigyabai

6/9/2026 at 1:30:20 AM

>Apple is hoping to draw in newer developers with lower AI infrastructure costs

Good luck, but define "cheaper" ? If you have to pay, no individual will pay, just corporations.

by jmclnx

6/9/2026 at 2:06:47 AM

How do you come to this conclusion. I know several people that are absolutely not techy dev types, yet they pay for a subscription to chatgpt.

by dylan604

6/9/2026 at 3:56:28 AM

You can get a certain portion of the population to pay $20/mo. but I think it's a very small population who's paying enough to actually cover frontier models in agentic workflows right now.

by emodendroket

6/9/2026 at 4:42:52 AM

Either I've fallen in with a unique group of non-techy people willing to pay for an LLM subscription, or you just not giving enough credit to it. I guess time will tell

by dylan604

6/9/2026 at 4:48:26 AM

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/04/nx-s1-5791661/chatgpt-gemini-...

> Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions.

But even among these people I doubt most spring for the $100 plans, let alone are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per user the way corporate users do.

by emodendroket

6/9/2026 at 5:02:47 AM

The funniest part of all of this is that, I as a techy dev type person, pay $0 for any LLM account. No, I'm not cheating with a paid by employer account. I just don't use it. So I guess my little group is breaking all of the stereotypes

by dylan604

6/9/2026 at 3:12:47 AM

> If you have to pay, no individual will pay

Fee with ads is the right fit for most people. But I don't think that describes most Apple customers or developers.

by JumpCrisscross

6/9/2026 at 11:51:59 AM

[dead]

by dhavalt

6/9/2026 at 2:53:04 AM

I'm 5'7" thank you very much. That's above average in some regions.

by genghisjahn