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Lead
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Apple proposes cutting its App Store fee in half
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Apple this week proposed a new fee of 5 to 15 percent on purchases made through outside payment links inside an app, roughly half its usual 30 percent in-app commission, in a fresh court filing tied to its long running case with Epic Games. On every 1,000 dollars a developer processes outside Apple's own payment system, this change could put back around 150 dollars that would previously have gone to Apple. This matters directly if you sell digital products, subscriptions, or courses through an iOS app, since it makes routing customers to an external checkout meaningfully more affordable than it has been. The proposal still needs court approval and Apple's actual mix of in-app versus outside-link revenue is not public, so nothing changes for sellers just yet, but if it goes through, this is the kind of fee shift that noticeably improves margins for any app based digital seller, without requiring you to do anything differently.
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Platform Change
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Redbubble just changed how print-on-demand sellers get paid
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Redbubble, one of the biggest marketplaces for uploading a design and having it printed on t-shirts, mugs, and stickers on demand, dropped its minimum payout threshold to just 10 dollars this July, down from the higher minimums sellers previously had to clear before cashing out. The platform has also moved to a tiered fee structure, Standard, Premium, and Pro, meaning sellers on the base Standard tier now face additional fees that eat into margins compared to before. The upside Redbubble still offers that most competitors do not is real built-in traffic: the platform runs its own Google Shopping ads and site-wide promotions on your behalf, so a brand new seller with zero following can realistically land a first sale, something a self-hosted Printful store connected to an empty Shopify page will never do without your own marketing effort. If you are just starting out with print-on-demand designs, Redbubble's audience advantage still makes it worth a look, but check which fee tier you are actually on, since the gap between tiers now meaningfully changes what you take home per sale.
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Reality Check
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Making an audiobook just got radically cheaper
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Hiring a professional human narrator typically costs 1,200 to 2,800 dollars for a full length book, a real barrier for a self published author. AI narration now runs 8 to 99 dollars for the same book depending on the tool, over a 90 percent reduction, and blind listening tests show it is already commercially indistinguishable from a human voice for most non-fiction. The catch is that platform rules vary and are changing fast: Spotify, Google Play Books, and Kobo all officially accept AI narrated audiobooks with no restrictions, but Audible's separate ACX upload system still requires human narration unless you go through its newer authorized Voice Replica program, where real narrators license an AI version of their own voice. If you have a manuscript sitting unpublished because audiobook production felt out of reach, this cost drop is a genuine opening, just confirm your target platform's current AI policy before you commit to a specific tool, since the rules differ meaningfully by distributor.
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Skill Building
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Here's what brands actually pay for micro influencer posts
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Fresh 2026 rate data puts micro influencer brand deals, creators with roughly 10,000 to 100,000 followers, at 150 to 500 dollars for an Instagram post, 200 to 800 dollars for a TikTok video, and 500 dollars or more for a YouTube integration, with video content consistently commanding 1.5 to 3 times more than a static post. The single biggest factor is not follower count, it is engagement rate: a creator with 30,000 followers and a 6 percent engagement rate is genuinely worth more to a brand than one with 80,000 followers and a 1.5 percent rate, and a healthy micro influencer engagement rate sits around 3 to 5 percent. Brands increasingly agree, with 73 percent now saying they prefer micro and mid-tier creators over celebrities specifically because that trust translates into real conversion. If you are pitching your first brand deal, lead with your actual engagement numbers rather than your follower count, and treat these ranges as your starting point for negotiation, not a ceiling.
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That's it for today. See you tomorrow.
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Ternautics Media
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