Amazon is reducing the cut it takes from revenue on its own Amazon Appstore for smaller developers and publishers, and offering those companies added AWS credits as an additional perk.
Amazon calls this initiative the Amazon Appstore Small Business Accelerator Program but Amazon is, of course, only the latest business to make this change.
These last few years have seen a number of digital storefronts alter the usual 30/70 revenue split in order to give smaller developers more favorable deals, but it’s hard to separate the trend from recent criticisms of first-party storefronts lobbed at Apple and Google by folks like Epic Games.
The Amazon Appstore itself is a partially third-party app store that operates on Google’s Android platform and Amazon’s own Fire OS. Starting in Q4, Amazon says it’ll reduce its own cut of all Appstore revenue (including in-app purchases) from 30 percent to only 20 percent for developers that earned under $1 million in revenue the previous calendar year.
On the developer side, that new revenue split will be the default option so long as they earned less than $1 million the year before, but it’s worth noting that crossing over $1 million in a current year will revert devs back to the standard 30/70 split right away.
It’s not as significant of a reduction as the 15 percent share both Apple and Google adopted for smaller developers on their platforms, but Amazon is looking to sweeten the pot by offering those smaller devs 10 percent of their overall revenue back as AWS promotional credits that can be used on the over 200 services in Amazon’s AWS suite.
“We believe these investments in our global developer community will generate more innovation within Amazon Appstore and increase the selection of apps for our customers,” writes the Amazon team. “The Small Business Accelerator Program is one of many projects we are undertaking to grow and support the developer community across Amazon so that developers of all sizes can continue to build for our Appstore and for our customers.”