Money

Substack subscriptions in the iOS app: inflated prices and a new “walled garden” for newsletters

If you host a paid newsletter on Substack, pay attention to the platform’s new in-app subscription offering for iOS. The company published a long FAQ about the change.

Apple requires all apps that sell digital content to use its in-app payment system — the one that charges a 15–30% fee. Substack relied on a loophole created by the recent Epic Games ruling in the US to make its iOS app compliant with App Store rules, giving iOS users the (default) option to subscribe via the web and avoid Apple’s fee.

The problem is that this exception applies only to the United States.

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I went all in spreadsheets for personal finance

The obscure, weird app that I had been using for five years to record my financial transactions failed to import data from the old phone to the new one. I took this as sign: it was time to move onto a better solution.

Personal finance doesn’t need to be complex, yet it’s only useful with a pinch of automated calculations, consolidations, and charts. I started researching for a new app with low requirements: something simple, that allowed me to enter my transactions (expenses and income) and review them at the end of each month or specific period.

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