Google Play Opens Its Billing to US Developers by June 30. Before You Quit Google's Cut, Run the Real Math.
Google Play's post-Epic changes hit the US, UK, and EEA by June 30. After settling with Epic Games in March, Google is rolling out the thing developers have wanted for years: you can use your own billing system instead of Google's, store fees come down, and third-party app stores get easier to install. Australia follows in September, Japan and South Korea by year's end, the rest of the world by late 2027.
The framing everywhere is "developers win, Google's monopoly cracks." And structurally, sure, more choice is better than less. But the practical question for a solo operator isn't whether the change is good for developers in the abstract. It's whether you should actually switch off Google's billing on July 1. For a lot of small apps, the answer is no, and the reason is arithmetic.
What actually changes June 30
Two things, and it's worth separating them because they get blurred together in the headlines.
First, you can now use your own billing system alongside Google Play's payment system in the US, UK, and EEA. You're no longer forced through Google's checkout to charge your users.
Second, the fees move. Google is lowering its store fees, and if you keep using Google Play's billing, there's a separate 5% billing fee for that service in those regions. So the old all-in cut is being unbundled into a distribution/service piece and a billing piece, and you can opt out of the billing piece by running your own.
That unbundling is the whole game. "Use your own billing and skip Google's 5%" sounds like found money. It is not found money. It's a swap, and you have to price the other side of the swap before you take it.
The cut you think you're escaping
Start with where you actually are. If you're a small developer, you're very likely already paying a reduced rate, not the headline 30%. Apple's Small Business Program drops the commission to 15% for anyone under $1M in annual proceeds, and Google has run an equivalent reduced tier for years. The post-settlement changes lower fees further on top of that.
So the cut a typical solo app is escaping by self-billing is not 30%. It's the billing slice (on the order of that 5%) sitting on top of an already-reduced service fee. That's the number that has to be worth more than what you take on by replacing it. And what you take on is not small.
What rolling your own billing actually costs
Here's the side of the ledger the "developers win" headline skips.
When you run your own billing, you become the merchant of record, or you pay someone like Paddle or LemonSqueezy to be it for you. Either way the costs show up:
- Payment processing. A processor takes roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. On small-ticket app purchases, that $0.30 fixed fee is brutal: on a $1.99 sale it's a 15% bite before the percentage even applies.
- Tax compliance. Google and Apple handle VAT, GST, and US sales tax for you today. Roll your own and that becomes your problem: either your time or a merchant-of-record's cut, which is typically more than the billing fee you left.
- Chargebacks and fraud. The platform absorbs a lot of this invisibly. On your own rail, every dispute is your time and your loss.
- Support and refunds. Billing questions become your inbox. At solo scale, that's real hours.
Add it up and for a low-volume app the do-it-yourself path often lands at parity with (or worse than) just paying Google's billing fee and letting the platform handle tax, fraud, and the $0.30-per-transaction reality. You'd be trading a clean 5% for a messier 8–12% plus your weekends.
Where switching does pay off
I'm not saying never leave. I'm saying do it at the right volume, for the right reason. Self-billing starts to win when:
- Your average transaction is large enough that the fixed per-transaction processing fee stops dominating. Subscriptions and higher-priced purchases survive the $0.30 far better than $0.99 one-offs.
- You're doing enough volume that the percentage savings clear the fixed overhead of tax compliance and a billing stack. Below that line, the overhead eats the savings.
- You actually want the direct customer relationship (your own receipts, your own dunning, your own data) and you'll use it. If you're not going to do anything with the relationship, you're paying for it anyway.
If none of those are true for you yet, the change is good news you don't have to act on. The option is valuable even when you don't exercise it.
The honest take
The Epic settlement is a genuine structural win, and I don't want to undersell it: competition on app distribution is overdue and the lower fees help everyone. But "Google opened billing" and "you should switch" are two different sentences, and the gap between them is where a solo operator loses money chasing a headline.
Run your own numbers before July. Take your real average transaction size, your real monthly volume, and price out processing plus tax plus support against the billing fee you'd actually save. For most solo apps under decent scale, the math says: take the win as optionality, keep using Google's billing for now, and revisit the day your volume or your price point crosses the line. The cut you're escaping is smaller than it looks, and the rail you'd replace it with isn't free.
Author
Lukas
@lukcombinator