Best App Store alternatives for distributing a Mac app

Ship inside the Mac App Store and Apple takes a cut of every sale — 30% by default, 15% if you qualify for the Small Business Program, with a further-reduced rate available to developers on Apple’s alternative business terms in the EU — and owns the customer record that comes with it. You get a sales number, not an email address. Every other way to put a paid Mac app in front of a customer trades that arrangement for a different one: a payment processor’s fee instead of a store commission, a revenue share instead of a flat cut, or nothing at all if you’re willing to run the whole funnel yourself.

None of these are free, and none of them are the same deal. A hosted storefront like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy charges more than a bare payment processor but takes tax compliance off your plate. Setapp pays out of a usage-weighted subscription pool instead of a per-sale price, which changes what “revenue” even means. Homebrew doesn’t charge anything, because it isn’t a storefront at all — it installs what you’ve already published, and never touches your checkout.

This list ranks the ways to distribute a paid Mac app outside the App Store by what they actually cost you in reach, margin, and control, checked against each vendor’s current terms. It pairs with how to sell an app outside the App Store, which covers the full playbook of signing, payment, and licensing; this page is narrower — just the distribution channel itself.

The best App Store alternatives for Mac apps

1. Direct download with a licensing layer — best margin and control

You host a signed, notarized DMG or ZIP on your own domain, send customers there from your landing page or post-purchase email, and pay nothing for the distribution itself — only your payment processor’s fee on top (Stripe’s standard US card rate is currently 3.4% + $0.50 per transaction — US card pricing; rates vary by country, card type, and Stripe products used). You keep full control of pricing, positioning, and the customer record, and answer to no platform’s review process.

What makes this practical rather than a project is not doing the licensing part yourself. Payment, license issuance, device activation, offline verification and refund revocation are one flow, and a licensing layer gives you all of it wired to your own Stripe account — you keep the margin and the customer relationship without also inheriting a backend to run. Keylight is built for exactly this shape: connect Stripe, drop in the SDK, and the channel stays yours. You still own the landing page, the download hosting, and an update mechanism such as Sparkle, and there’s no built-in discovery to offset any of it.

2. Direct download, fully self-built — best if you want to own every layer

The same channel, with the licensing stack written and maintained in-house: key generation and signing, a server to issue and revoke, device-activation accounting, an offline verification path in the app, webhook handling for refunds and chargebacks, and a customer-facing way to move a licence between machines. Some teams should do this — you have unusual entitlement rules, a compliance reason to hold every record, or the volume to justify the headcount.

Be honest with yourself about the ongoing cost rather than the initial build. The first version is a couple of weeks; what follows is key rotation, clock-skew and replay edge cases, a support queue for activation failures, and a security surface you now own. For most indie developers the build is affordable and the maintenance is not, which is the calculation that sends people back to option 1.

3. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy hosted storefronts — best for outsourced tax compliance

Both are merchants of record: they become the legal seller, register for and remit VAT and sales tax in the jurisdictions where you owe it, host the checkout page, and absorb chargeback liability. That costs more than running your own payment processor account — a flat percentage plus a small fixed fee, in the mid-single digits per transaction — but it removes an entire compliance category a solo developer would otherwise have to build or hire for. You still control your own landing page and download; only checkout and tax handling move off your plate. See best payment processors for Mac apps for the line-by-line fee comparison.

4. Gumroad — best for the fastest possible launch

Gumroad became a merchant of record itself in 2025: it charges 10% + $0.50 per sale made through your own page or links, or 30% for a sale that comes through its Discover marketplace. That’s a higher cut than a dedicated merchant-of-record storefront, but there’s no setup beyond creating a product page — useful for a first launch, a low-volume side project, or testing a price point before committing to heavier infrastructure.

5. Setapp — best for reach through an existing subscriber base

Setapp is a curated Mac app subscription: customers pay Setapp, not you, and Setapp distributes roughly 70% of that subscription revenue across the developers whose apps a subscriber actually opened during the billing period, weighted by a price-tier multiplier — so being listed doesn’t guarantee sales the way a checkout does. Developers who personally refer a subscriber can additionally earn a share of that specific user’s monthly fee, but that referral bonus applies only to users you bring in yourself, not to Setapp revenue generally. Setapp doesn’t require exclusivity, so you can list there alongside your own site or the App Store; the tradeoff is that you don’t set the price the customer pays, and payout depends on usage, not units sold.

6. Homebrew cask — best install convenience for a developer audience

Homebrew doesn’t sell anything — a cask is a formula that tells brew install --cask where to fetch the app you’ve already built and published, with no checkout, discovery feed, or revenue share involved. Paid, closed-source software is allowed; there’s no requirement that a cask’s app be free or open source. But a cask must point at verifiable upstream distribution you control, and a trial build is only accepted if the same download can unlock into the full version without a second download — a separate trial-only binary isn’t eligible, and a cask can’t point at an app that’s only available through the Mac App Store. Treat Homebrew as an install-friction reducer for developers who already decided to buy, not a channel that finds you customers.

7. Bundle deals — best for a short revenue and audience spike

Bundle sites package your app alongside several others at a steep discount for a limited window, in exchange for a share of the bundle price or a flat placement fee — terms vary by bundle and are negotiated per deal, so there’s no standard rate to quote here. What you get in return is a burst of downloads and access to an audience you didn’t have to acquire yourself, often at a fraction of your normal price. Useful as an occasional spike, not a repeatable revenue base — most bundle buyers wouldn’t have paid your regular price.

8. Product Hunt and directories — best for discovery, not distribution

Product Hunt, alternative-to directories, and app-listing sites don’t distribute anything — there’s no checkout, no download hosting, and no revenue share, because you’re not selling through them. What they do is put your app in front of people who are actively looking, for a launch day or on an ongoing basis, and send that traffic to whichever channel above you actually use to close the sale. Worth doing because it’s close to free, but it’s additive to a real distribution channel, not a substitute for one.

Distribution is not licensing

None of the eight options above decide who is allowed to run your app once it’s installed — that’s a different job, and conflating the two is the most common way developers under-build. A download link, a Setapp listing, or a Homebrew cask hands over a binary; nothing about how the customer got it enforces that only a paying customer can use it. That holds even when the channel handles payment, though less absolutely than licensing vendors like to claim. Gumroad and Paddle will both issue a license key alongside the receipt, and their APIs will tell you whether a given key is valid. What they don’t give you is something your app can check on its own: validation is a call to their servers, so an app that opens offline has no answer, and a key that arrives by email still has to be turned into a gate by code you write.

A licensing layer is what closes that gap. It turns a completed payment into a signed entitlement your app checks locally, tracks how many devices are activated against a given license, and revokes access after a refund or chargeback. Pair whichever channel above fits your app with a licensing layer that does that job — macOS app licensing and desktop app licensing cover how that piece works in detail.

How to choose

• Want maximum margin and control without building a backend → direct download with a licensing layer.
• Want to own every layer, and have a reason worth the maintenance → direct download, fully self-built.
• Selling globally and don’t want to register for VAT yourself → Paddle or Lemon Squeezy.
• Want to be taking payment within the hour → Gumroad.
• Want passive reach through subscribers who already pay for other apps → Setapp.
• Want to remove install friction for a developer audience that already knows your app → Homebrew cask.
• Want a short, one-time spike in revenue and audience → bundle deals.
• Want visibility to people actively looking, layered on top of a real channel → Product Hunt and directories.

Where Keylight fits

Every channel above answers “how does the customer get the app.” A couple of them will also hand out a license key. What none of them give you is an answer your app can verify by itself, offline — that’s what Keylight does, sitting on top of whichever channel or combination you pick. Connect Stripe, or another payment provider through a webhook, and a completed payment mints a signed license your Mac app verifies offline, with device limits and refund revocation handled automatically. It also replaces the analytics you lose by leaving the App Store’s own dashboard behind: active devices by day and month, new activations against churn, and a breakdown by country and platform, so leaving Apple’s storefront doesn’t mean flying blind. Plans start at $19/month, with a free tier to test the full flow before you commit to a distribution strategy.