Meta plans to start charging a 30% fee for boosting Facebook and Instagram posts on iOS later in February, after Apple extended its 30% cut to boosting in 2022
Meta said Thursday that it will start charging a 30 percent fee when advertisers pay to boost the visibility of their posts in Facebook's and Instagram's iOS apps.
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta had previously pursued payment paths that could avoid app-store commissions, including native payment links for Facebook creator subscriptions. It also introduced paid, ad-free choices for Facebook and Instagram users in parts of Europe, showing a broader effort to segment platform access and monetization.
The new iOS boosting charge makes Apple’s platform economics directly visible to the advertisers and creators who buy distribution inside Meta’s apps, rather than leaving that cost embedded in Meta’s own margins.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and creators that buy Facebook or Instagram post boosts through the iOS apps face a 30% fee, increasing the effective cost of those purchases.
- Meta changes the iOS purchase flow for boosts to account for Apple’s commission on those transactions.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers able to choose another purchase channel have a clear incentive to avoid buying boosts in the iOS apps, making payment-channel choice part of campaign cost management.
- Meta’s earlier use of native subscription payment links becomes more relevant as the company seeks to preserve economics on transactions that can be completed outside iOS.
Third-order effects
- If major apps continue passing app-store commissions through to business users, mobile operating-system payment rules will increasingly shape the pricing of advertising and creator tools—not just consumer subscriptions.
- The pattern strengthens pressure for clearer alternatives to in-app payment, while regulators’ scrutiny of Meta’s pay-or-consent model shows how pricing design can become a policy issue as well as a commercial one.
The trend: App-store take rates are becoming a visible, transaction-level cost that platforms increasingly allocate to the businesses and users purchasing digital services on mobile.