Surprisingly enough. I use a lot of things in the App Store (which I assume you meant) without paying a dime to Apple - including Amazon digital purchases and prime video, Hulu, Netflix, Office 365, Udemy and DirecTVNow.

Most of the money Apple makes from the App Store are for in app consumables from games. Admittedly there are still a lot of legacy subscriptions from both Netflix and Spotify before they pulled out of going through Apple for subscriptions.

But the companies that operate those apps are paying Apple. So Apple still gets their cut.

The same goes for Yelp or GrubHub. You can use Yelp for free, but Yelp is generally preying on local businesses to force the businesses to pay Yelp because of Yelp's distribution online.

GrubHub often has free delivery, but they are charging huge commissions to the restaurant you order from.

Someone always pays. It is the way the world works.

The $99 yearly developer program fee is hardly Apple getting "their cut".

Paying Apple for what? What money is Apple getting when you subscribe for services outside of the App Store?

The app store offers subscriptions. If you subscribe to, say, netflix or hulu using an ios app, apple collects 15-30% of the subscription revenue. Netflix fairly publicly killed the app store subscription payment method in the beginning of the year because of this.

That was just the point. At no time did you have to go through the App Store to get s Netflix subscription. You could always go through the Netflix website.

Netflix chose to use the App Store as a method for payment even though they didn’t have to. They decided it was worth the trade off. Plenty of subscription services decided it wasn’t from day one.

the devs had to pay big fees to apple to get the app posted

$99 is almost nothing for a large company, who likely gives Apple a lot more money via the 30% cut.

$99/year is a “big fee”? I pay slightly more than that for my Resharper license.

$99 / year