There's a phrase people throw around: the "Apple tax."
It refers to the commission Apple charges developers through the App Store — up to 30% of revenue — and it carries a critical edge: that Apple is skimming off the top of developers' earnings without doing much to deserve it.
The same idea gets generalized into "platform tax," a term used to describe how players like Google, Apple, and Amazon collect rent from the ecosystem — taking a cut of the value others create, seemingly without bearing much risk themselves.
I build Stailer, an online grocery platform, at 10X. So naturally, I have some feelings about this framing.
Are platforms really just toll booths — easy money, no risk?
What a Platform Actually Is
I wrote a longer piece on what platforms are about four years ago, but the short version is this: a platform is a business that provides the space and tools for third parties to create value.
Rather than controlling the user experience directly, you step back and let others build on top of what you've made.
That hands-off quality — not intervening, not controlling end users directly — is exactly what makes platforms look, from the outside, like they're getting a free ride.
The Tax That Platforms Actually Pay
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
What's less visible is that platforms carry their own unique burdens — their own kind of tax.
Take Apple. In 2025, the company announced it had blocked over $2.2 billion in fraudulent App Store transactions. Over the past six years, that number adds up to $11.2 billion. Every year, Apple rejects over 2 million app submissions and processes more than 1.3 billion reviews to filter out bad actors.
The "30% is too high" critique is understandable. But what's nearly invisible to developers is that a small-nation-scale budget is being spent on maintaining the security infrastructure of the platform — and on fighting a never-ending war against fraud.
Airbnb is another example. Enabling strangers to stay in each other's homes requires a level of trust that's genuinely hard to build. The company reportedly has over 500 Trust & Safety staff available around the clock, plus more than 20 external specialists handling anti-trafficking efforts, fraud detection, and coordination with law enforcement.
Uber might look like it just matches riders with drivers, but it handles driver background checks, insurance coverage, real-time safety monitoring, and compliance with local regulations in every market it operates.
The common thread: the cost of maintaining trust, safety, and integrity on a platform grows as the platform scales. And that cost is almost entirely invisible to the people using it.
This is the platform's tax.
The Tax Stailer Pays
10X powers online grocery operations for a number of major supermarket chains through Stailer. We've lived the platform tax firsthand. Here are a few examples.
- The cost of reliability: If Stailer goes down, every partner's online store goes down. The redundancy and monitoring required is an order of magnitude beyond what you'd build for a single client. The cost behind "it just works" is substantial.
- The cost of standardization: Every partner has different data structures, different workflows, different requirements. We have to continuously abstract individual requirements into common specs the platform can support. Deciding what level of abstraction to target, and when, is genuinely hard design work.
- The cost of backward compatibility: Any API or spec change can ripple across every connected partner. Decisions about what to change become progressively more conservative. A fix that would take a day in isolation can take many times longer once you factor in impact analysis and migration planning.
- The cost of triaging requests: More partners means more incoming requests, always. With limited resources, you constantly have to decide what to build and what to decline — with incomplete information. You also have to judge whether a request can be generalized across partners or only serves one. And whoever gets turned down is left dissatisfied.
That last point is the one that stings most. Facing "why won't you just build this?" over and over is a pain specific to platforms.
Everyone wants to make the person in front of them happy. The instinct is to say "yes, we can do that." But to avoid the fallacy of composition — where doing what's right for one ends up being wrong for all — you have to say no. You have to step back from the chance to score 100 points with one partner.
That asymmetry might be the real essence of the platform tax.
The Tax Paid Where No One's Looking
Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash
From the outside, most of these costs are invisible. The platform not going down, the specs being consistent, the system behaving predictably — it all looks like table stakes. The reasons behind which requests got built and which didn't are invisible too.
Stailer runs on an outcome-based revenue model, meaning our revenue grows when our partners' businesses grow. That naturally creates a sense of being deeply aligned — almost like one company. Partners' problems feel like our problems.
But running an online grocery operation and building the platform that supports it are fundamentally different businesses. The tax a retailer pays and the tax a platform pays are different in kind. Neither side can fully understand what the other is carrying.
That's exactly why some degree of mutual imagination matters.
The phrase "platform tax" exists because the platform's costs aren't visible — because it looks like platforms are the only ones winning. But the reverse is also true: platforms need to keep imagining what kind of tax their partners are paying to run their businesses day to day.
That, I think, is what a healthy platform-centered business actually looks like.
