Most "gross revenue vs net revenue" explainers are generic accounting content that never mentions an app store. For a developer, the number a sales dashboard shows in real time and the number that lands in a bank account at month end are rarely within 30% of each other, and the gap is made of line items the dashboard never shows at all. This is a walk through where a representative $10,000 gross payout to a non-US developer actually goes, using published fee schedules plus one developer's real monthly payout statement as the illustrative case.

The five deductions, in order

Platform commission. Taken first, against gross, before anything else. The published rate is the easy part: both major platforms document it clearly.

Currency conversion spread. Payouts are converted from the store's settlement currency to the developer's local currency at a rate that includes a spread over the interbank rate, typically 0.5-2%, disclosed nowhere on the sales dashboard.

Chargebacks and involuntary refunds. Distinct from voluntary refunds a developer approves: these are reversed by the payment network or the platform after the fact, and they land in whichever payout period processes them, not the one the original sale happened in.

Cross-border tax withholding. Where a tax treaty doesn't fully apply, a percentage is withheld at source before payout, recoverable in some jurisdictions via a foreign tax credit and simply lost in others.

Local income tax, which is out of scope for a single payout walk-through since it depends on the developer's full-year position, see a subscription or general income calculator for that step separately.

Why this surprises solo developers specifically

A finance team at a larger company reconciles the payout statement against the sales dashboard every month as a matter of process, and the gap is a known, budgeted-for number. A solo developer checking a sales dashboard daily has no equivalent reconciliation step, so the first time the full gap becomes visible is often the annual tax filing, by which point it reads as a shock rather than an expected cost of doing business through an app store.

What to actually track monthly

Reconciling the payout statement (not the sales dashboard) against a simple five-line ledger: commission, currency spread, chargebacks, withholding, and running net, turns this from an annual surprise into a monthly five-minute check. The inputs are already on the statement the platform sends; the only work is deciding to read it.