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Apple's App Store Tops 40 Billion Downloads; Generates $7 Billion For Developers
An anonymous reader writes "With the eyes of the tech world fixed on CES this week, Apple this morning conveniently decided to issue a press release announcing that the iTunes App Store has now topped over 40 billion downloads. That's an incredible feat, to be sure, but even more incredible is that nearly half of those downloads occurred in 2012. In December alone, iOS users downloaded over 2 billion applications, setting a monthly record in the process."
Hurr durr. Apple hurts developers.
or all downloads.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
2 Billion $ devided by 1000's of developers is not much income per dev. I'd rather see an average breakdown per dev or full breakdown.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
That is an insane level of growth. One of the things that doesn't get discussed a lot here was Verizon, AT&Ts and Sprint's sales numbers for postpay (around 70%) marketshare. I don't know however how large the global cellphone software market is x-USA.
The other data I'd love to know is how much cloud based solutions like Dropbox and Evernote that owe a lot of their revenue to mobile app are getting.
Since Apple is paying for the infrastructure, it's actually quite good. You try paying for your own servers and bandwidth - you won't be making anything after 6 downloads.
Apple's last announcements on these figures were in September and October. In September, they quoted 700,000 total iOS apps, and in October they quoted 275,000 iPad apps. That's an average rate 641 total iOS apps per day, and 427 iPad specific apps per day. (Source: Apple)
The numbers on Android are a little hard to find. Does anyone have a figure for how many Android tablet apps are available?
It seems the Google Play store is growing faster, with 833 apps per day on average between September and October... but based on Google's previous announcements they seem to approve apps in fits and starts, with some periods approving thousands of apps per day, and other periods where the approval rate drops to 1/3 of that. (Source: Google)
On the Windows side, the Windows 8/RT store is growing at the same rate as the iPad app catalog, with an average 584 apps per day (before the Holidays). And the Windows Phone store is growing at about 300 apps per day over the past 6 months. I don't know how to combine these figures to compare to Android or iOS, since it's not clear how iOS counts apps for iPhone and iPad (is that 1 app or 2 apps) (Source: http://metrostore.preweb.sk/ and http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/)
Anyone else have other figures available?
You have to factor in free downloads.
I would assume that the free, gimped, holiday version of angry birds is one download (remember kids, the first taste of crack is always free) and the full version would be another.
By the way, does the 7b included ”in app” ad revenue and purchases?
Compare that 30% with the system in place by the phone companies. You were lucky if you got 30%.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I think this is more just an indicator of mobile device usage. Apple's tooting their own horn, but I'm sure the android numbers are respectable which could mean closer to 65+ billion app downloads and growing at 2 billion+ a/month. The developer number is meaningless but makes Apple look charitable.
Wiki tells me that 250 Million iPhones have been sold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
Apple tells us 40 Billion downloads. (Unique Purchaces)
40B/250M = 160
So the AVERAGE iPhone downloads 160 Applications?
#Fishy
And suggests ~$10 billion in revenue; assuming $1 per download, that suggests 1 out of 4 downloads was paid. Even at $5 per download that suggests 1 in 20 downloads was paid. I find even that hard to beleive.
Especially given how many people I know that spend a large amount of their free time downloading free apps, messing with them for 10 minutes, and then deleting them.
Hell, that's even how I approach mobile apps. For example I bought my son a "toy guitar" for christmas; it pretty much needs constant tuning. so I went through 7 or 8 different free guitar tuning apps before finding one I liked.
I'd have thought that sort of thing would have been the largest portion of downloads. Alongside the big ones ... twitter, facebook, instagram, does groupon have an app (?), netflix, etc, etc... and that stuff is also all free.
I've got to believe that they are including in app purchases and so on to get up to those final totals.
Microsoft also drops to only taking 20% after a certain sales figure. (I think it was $50K).
-]Phreak Out[-
Seems like a reasonable cost for running something on the scale that they do.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Hmmm forgot about the iPad... another 100M there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad
Still 40B/350M = 114
Still 114 is a pretty big number.
They also handle the bandwidth for downloads, electricity and expenses for servers, and cost of performing credit card transactions. I suspect that $3 billion in revenue doesn't go very far after accounting for all of the expenses.
As for why Microsoft wants one, it's probably because Balmer has no clue what he's doing and sees that everyone else has an app store now, so Microsoft must also clearly have one.
I am of two different minds about the Apple "App Store", so here's my list of Apple's Goods and Bads:
-- "App Store" is a walled garden designed to keep you in
-- "App Store" is well maintained and crapware/spamware does not sneak in that often
-- "App Store" has an opaque process for allowing or denying, whether you are a singleton programmer or a 8-kiloton-Grrrilla like google. You don't get to know why you got stymied or what you need to do to fix it.
-- It provides a good "storefront" for developers to sell their wares at a decent pricepoint with low overhead (30% is low, right?) added on to it
-- It makes it impossible to be an independent software developer and sell software that can be installed by the enduser so you could set up your own infrastructure and sell direct to the customer and keep more profits
-- Their awful awful policy makes it impossible to package and distribute any GPL code through their ecosystem. Das ist verboten.
:>(
That last entry alone is enough to make the sumof(Goods+Bads)=Bad. That's my two centimes!
Bandwidth, etc. doesn't cost anything...
But credit card transactions is a big expenditure here... Try finding a payment provider that takes less than 30% or 30 cent?
Maybe you can get it cheaper if you are a big player like Apple, but when both Google, Amazon and Paypal are priced at 30% or 30 cent, I imagine that VISA and MASTER card prices are pretty much up there...
Apple doesn't make a significant amount of money off the app store. Having lots of software and games available sells hardware.
The unknown figure for both platforms is how much developers are making from ad revenue. This could potentially be much higher on Android.
I'd imagine that this is the case because when Android phones first came out, paid applications weren't available on Android Market in all countries. So developers had to price their applications at zero to reach users in those countries.
Let's see 40billion downloads generate $7billion for developers.
So each download puts about 17 cents into the pockets of a developer.
An excellent business model for Apple.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Near 0 –apple reject apps with "little or no utility".
Not on all days.
$7bn is a very tidy sum for developers of paid apps.
That sum doesn't not include iAd revenue, or more significantly, all the money developers make creating custom made applications for businesses. So developers can make decent bank developing on iOS.
Others on here are arguing about the 30% cut Apple are taking.
For that 30%, they are paying for all the infrastructure, credit card transaction fees, iTunes card costs. If a super market charges $20 for a iTunes voucher, at least here in NZ, they would have made some money, plus GST of 15% is included in that price.
So $20 credit probably brakes down to something like:
15% GST = $2.69
SuperMarket cut = $2
Apple = $15.39
Developer payout = $14
Leaves Apple with $1.39
Now not all transactions will cost Apple that much, such as when iTunes credit is purchased via credit card, then GST is still factored within that $20 plus credit card transaction fees would leave Apple with about ~$3.20.
The point is, after you take away POS costs, infrastructure costs (data centres, human phone support etc), they do not make as much money as you think they do from their 30% cut.
There are probably a dozen things I have missed but I am sure /. will point them out to me :P
That is the kind of sales that one Call of Duty game can do.
Now that's fine, I'm not saying everything should (or can) be a massive billion dollar hit but let's have a little perspective. What do developers tend to make?
This would particularly be interesting if you take off the outliers. Remove Angry Birds, and any other really big hit apps and then see what it looks like for the masses of developers.
The payment card industry negotiates rates based on many things, including what your card handling practices are, if your entire network and organization is PCI compliant, volume, average transaction size, etc.
For example, I work for a company that does about $100B in retail revenue annually. Our holy IT mantra is to not do anything that even remotely would run afoul of the PCI audit, because losing certified compliance would cause the transaction fees to go up, which is literally a billion dollar mistake.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So on average one dollar for every six download.
iTunes music and video sales must be a freaking goldmine compared to that - 6 app downloads just to make a buck??? If it weren't for ad revenue, this model wouldn't work at all. Might as well not even bother.
I am a game developer, and I have my game in apple store, it is called Block Story.
I have my app in the apple store and google play. There is nothing compelling me to use google play for example, I could sell the game from my own web site but I would be crazy to do this. I still voluntarily pay that 30% to have the app in google play and apple store.
Why do I do it? well, you really can't dismiss all the work they do for you (both stores), consider:
They charge 30%? you know what, they earned it.
Those numbers are hideous. Compare that to a Windows PC, where the average user probably buys $200 or more in software.
And suggests ~$10 billion in revenue; assuming $1 per download, that suggests 1 out of 4 downloads was paid. Even at $5 per download that suggests 1 in 20 downloads was paid. I find even that hard to believe.
Apple's users don't mind paying for getting something with better quality. That's the major reason why, despite the larger numbers of Android phones, developers prefer the iOS platform.
And yes, the figure will include in-app purchases. It's the "paid out to developers" figure, so is not just downloads.
For example I bought my son a "toy guitar" for christmas; it pretty much needs constant tuning. so I went through 7 or 8 different free guitar tuning apps before finding one I liked.
Sure, and there will be other people like you. And then there will be people who are not like you. People tend to overestimate the number of people that are similar to themselves.
80% of zero is zero.
I was comparing a phone to a device that costs about half as much - a Windows laptop.
Erm, most of those cheap guitars come with electronic tuners. You must have really cheaped out to get a "toy" guitar without a tuner. Besides, a decent chromatic tuner is about $30 in Australia (so it's probably cheaper where you live). If you wasted more than 1 hour of your time on free apps, you lost money.
Beyond this, you wont find a decent tuner application on a phone because the microphone on a phone is made for the frequency range of the human voice which is 85Hz to 225Hz, a six string in normal tuning has a frequency between 82Hz (E2) and 1318Hz (E6). Even hitting an open top E (E4 = 329Hz) is beyond what the hardware is meant for. To properly tune a guitar you need test both the open and 12th fret, so on the top E string that's E4 at 330Hz and E5 at 659Hz.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Just to be a pendant,
There is something compelling you to use Google Play, the services and advantages you listed in your post. What you mean is there is nothing forcing you to use Google Play.
This is a commission, standard procedure really. They're handling the store front, you're making the merchandise. It's worked well this way for centuries. This I have no issue with.
My problems with the Apple App store are:
1. They double dip. First you have to pay a yearly fee, then 30% of the income.
2. They total editorial control over what I can sell. If Google Play refuse to sell my application, I can go elsewhere (other app stores or sell it myself) with Apple, you're SOL and the reasons Apple reject your application seem whimsical and random.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You just said "they just aren't given the option to do it via iTunes". Which means the artists get paid for every download. Which is exactly my point - musicians get paid for every download, app devs get paid for 1-in-6. Big difference there.
Sorry, compelling was the wrong word, I meant coercing. English is my second language ;)
The fee apple charges is really nothing, I got 2 times that amount on day 1. Calling that double dipping is stretching it. It is obviously just a token to make sure people don't open accounts for the heck of it. That if you open an account is because you actually want to release an app.
Besides, they do not deceive you in any way, you know well in advance what the fee is and that they charge 30%. If you decide to do business with them, you know exactly what you have to pay, and it is up to you to decide if the fee + 30% is worth it for you or not. If you say yes, it is because you think their service is worth more than that cost, in which case you have nothing to complaint about. If you say no, then you simply develop for android and go to the competition, in which case what apple charges makes no difference to you, it is not like they have a monopoly.
Getting your app rejected is indeed obnoxious, and can drive your costs up. I would prefer some relaxing on these rules, though I can understand why they do it: They want their customers to have a good impression of their devices, and they want to ensure customers don't feel scammed in their store. So they try to make sure apps have certain quality. I agree some reasons appear to be very arbitrary. It would be a lot better if the rules were crystal clear from the get go.
Credit card processors usually have a percentage fee plus a small per transaction fee. For example, PayPal (not my first choice, but they can be used for payment processing) takes 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. They claim that you can get down to 2.2% with larger volume, but the 30cents is firm. If you are making transactions for $1 at a time, the 30 cents will eat you alive. At those rates the Apple cut is a good deal just for payment processing.
If you are selling a $5 app, that 30 cents just became a much smaller percentage of your costs. Payment processing would now be in the realm of 9%. The rest of the 21% Apple cut is probably fair for the distibution, servers, etc. Not too bad a deal.
I am appalled that you can not see the utility of a fart app.
No problems, I was just being a pendant.
Not really, They aren't charging a once off fee for a developer license. They are charging it yearly. Don't pay the fee and they take down your application.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You must have really cheaped out to get a "toy" guitar without a tuner.
He's 8. We'll see if he has any interest in learning a musical instrument or not before buying something decent.
Besides, a decent chromatic tuner is about $30 in Australia (so it's probably cheaper where you live). If you wasted more than 1 hour of your time on free apps, you lost money.
Not sure where you would go to buy a guitar tuner on Christmas morning, and I value staying away from the mall on boxing day at more than $30... and really... I probably spent close to an hour tuning the guitar the first time, including trying the apps, and the fact that it was WAY out of tune, while the follow up tuning has mostly been comparatively minor adjustments. 1/4 to 1/2 turn rather than 5 turns...
Beyond this, you wont find a decent tuner application on a phone because the microphone on a phone is made for the frequency range of the human voice
Thanks that's quite interesting really and the limits of the mic make sense. But I was actually able to get more than passable results from the free apps.
The fact that you can easily validate tuning of a given string relative to the other strings by ear helps. So once one or two strings are right, it gets pretty easy.
To properly tune a guitar you need test both the open and 12th fret, so on the top E string that's E4 at 330Hz and E5 at 659Hz.
Like I said he's 8. If his interest in guitars and music is not long forgotten by his birthday we'll consider investing in a better product, and even professional lessons instead of what I can remember of guitar from high school, and the piano I took as a kid myself. :)
Mac and Linux systems. I hear that some folks make a ton of money for Linux stuff they develop. IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, etc etc etc. And I highly doubt they have to have 6 customers download something to make a single dollar.
5% - Humble Store. They do barely better than break even, but the point is they *do* break even. 30% is 25% profit.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Most of this is stuff that can be automated and thus while it adds value, doesn't really cost much to provide. Long-term, competition will drive its price down closer to what it costs to provide (just a few percent). Unless there's a monopoly or industry collusion like has happened in banking/credit cards.
Right now though, I agree it's worth it. You have to compare to what a physical publisher would charge you. Typically 60%-75% of published software's retail price went to the publisher/marketer/store, the developer was lucky to get more than 25%. So compared to that, 70% is a veritable fortune. It'll just take the market a while to adjust to the huge disruption online sales have created.
People tend to overestimate the number of people that are similar to themselves.
Most insightful comment on slashdot ever.
Don't pay the fee and they take down your application.
Citation needed. I believe they just don't allow you to upload new apps or updates. Also, for that $99 fee you get two developer support events. That means Apple engineers are looking at your code and helping you.
Wether they can automate the whole thing or not, does not make an iota of difference to me. Heck I would actually prefer if they automate it because it means less human error. What matters to me is the value that this service has. What matters to me is that this service is worth much more to me than the $99/year + 30%. What matters to me is that the alternative: doing it myself, would cost me much more, and it would have much worse sales.
If they could automate all of this and do it at a cost of a couple cents, then I congratulate them, it would be an amazing feat, and they deserve all that profit.
But as someone else pointed out, it does cost quite a bit of money for apple to do this, http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/23/app-store-1-of-apples-gross-profit/ And they are not even factoring in the labor involved (they manually review apps).
Generates $7 Billion For Developers
and $3 billion for Apple at 30cents out of every dollar. Quite a tidy sum for the gatekeeper, is it any wonder that Microsoft would like to wall their own garden?
That "gatekeeper" is also providing:
Hosting and Bandwidth
Advertising
Marketing
Placement in a wildly successful "one-stop-shopping" online "store", with a frickin' BUTTON to said store on EVERY iOS device, creating a somewhat "captive" audience of millions and millions of users, the vast majority of which WHO WILL BE LOOKING EXACTLY ONE PLACE FOR APPS.
Credit Card Processing
Payment Collection
Distribution
No problems, I was just being a pendant.
Nice.
the microphone on a phone is made for the frequency range of the human voice which is 85Hz to 225Hz,
You're an idiot. Go back to school.
The fundamental frequency of the human voice (in speech) may very well only extend to 225 Hz (that figure is for a female speaking voice, IIRC, the male "fundamental" is about 125 Hz, typically), but the harmonics and other "consonant" sounds extend up over 3 kHz. The microphone in the iPhone/iPad goes well above that. Otherwise, you couldn't understand the speech in a phone conversation, because all the other side would hear would be "vowel sounds".
And, it's easily proven: Just take your typical cellphone and record some music with the microphone. Do you understand the lyrics? 3 kHz upper limit. Do you hear the cymbals? 20 kHz+ upper limit (although the phone probably tops out at about 10 kHz or so).
As a (I suppose) musician, you should be well aware that the condenser microphones that are used in most inexpensive phones and other devices have an excellent frequency response, particularly in the upper regions. That's why condenser mics. are the favorite for mic-ing snare drums, drum kit "overheads", and acoustic guitar.
I can't stand technically-ignorant musicians, who then spout their (non)-wisdom as if they were some sort of "expert", just because they can play a Pentatonic scale and some "Power Chords" with some fluency.
I sure hope your sound man is smarter than you, or I pity your audiences...
I wouldn't be surprised if they are losing money hand over fist from the app store. Maybe they are running it as a loss leader to get more sign-ups onto long term contracts with the cell companies.
PayPal is 5% + $0.05 if you're selling a $1 app. That's ten cents, a third of what Apple is charging. If your app is $20 then its 2.5% + $0.30, which is eighty cents. Compare that to the six dollars Apple will gouge you for. If this is what PayPal is offering to anyone with a bank account then I'm sure you can get a better deal if you look for it.
You're either a con or a liar, or both.
All PayPal is doing for their "cut" is providing only one of the services that Apple provides with the App Store. And they make money on every single transaction. When a user downloads a FREE App, Apple's costs aren't "free" for that transaction. They hosted the app, provided marketing, product placement, distribution, and other services, but they didn't make a dime off the download.
PayPal (and every other "payment processor") doesn't have to contend with any of that.
to properly set a bridge and truss rod you have to check the open string and 12th fret this is called setting intonation and shouldn't need to be done when tuning the guitar. If the intonation is off then the interval between frets is not even E to E is no longer an octave. The problem is that some bridges come with finger screws for this (they adjust the string length between the bridge and nut) and the sales people call them tuners when selling the guitar to a beginner. You shouldn't have to set the intonation more than once a year so long as the guitar doesn't experience large altitude and humidity changes remember most of them are still made of wood. So take the nut lock off throw it away and stop trying to tune with the bridge screws.
Actually, obtaining a CFE certification is extremely difficult despite your highly suspect statements to the contrary. The requirements include: A bachelor's degree in accounting or criminal justice plus 2 years of professional fraud investigation experience as a prerequisite; Recommendations from other established CFE's; Twenty units of CPE required annually; Passage of a comprehensive exam on issues related to Law, Criminology, Investigations, and Accounting. Most applicants study for about a year to prep for the exam. CFE is one of the most recognized and respected international credentials for professional fraud analysts in the world, with official recognition of the certification in over 100 countries. For more info, the website of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners is www.acfe.com.
That's a wonderful idea. Too bad that our cash registers in our stores still have to traverse our network to get to the credit card processor. Thus, we might as well do the transaction ourselves and save a few cents each on a couple billion credit card swipes.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That's an interesting ilnk, since it says that the credit card companies are half of Apple's share of the apps, and the overwhelming majority of their costs.
Of course what you really mean to say is "Apple doesn't make a significant amount of money [on the app store, compared to the rest of their revenues]." Which may be realistic, but even the $1.5 billion they get as profit (based on the costs in the link) is not really insignificant. If they don't want it, I'll take it :)
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Obviously, you didn't listen to your doctors warning about not consistently taking your meds.
Huh, huh.
Huh, huh huh.
Ha ha ha ha.
Haaaaaaaa HaaaaaaHaaaaaaHaaaaHaaa.
Hee heeeeeee haaaahaaahoooooooo....
Apple's users don't mind paying for getting something with better quality.
What is that supposed to mean? I am an apple user. The people I'm drawing for data points are all apple users. They aren't paying for apps.
That's the major reason why, despite the larger numbers of Android phones, developers prefer the iOS platform.
The major reason its preferred is that it has a large install base and there is really only all of one model of phone to target "the new one"; and its probably the phone the developer owns too. That makes it easy.
despite the larger numbers of Android phones,
There are androids and then there are androids. The "total number" of androids is pretty meaningless when comparing the two market places, except as a starting point to identify what percentage of androids are upmarket.
Meanwhile, last years iphones are free on contracts; so they are being picked up by more downmarket users whose pricepoint is "free" as well; although these are still users in contracts which are generally more spendy then the pay-as-you go group.
Sure, and there will be other people like you. And then there will be people who are not like you. People tend to overestimate the number of people that are similar to themselves.
True enough, but I know a LOT of iphone users -- one of the companies I work with is a cell phone dealer -- and no one I know of has more than one or two paid apps. Most have none at all. They all have a few free apps... many of them have downloaded dozens of free apps.
As an aside, i read today that over 50% of the developer revenue goes to just 25 developers.
True enough, but I know a LOT of iphone users -- one of the companies I work with is a cell phone dealer
You're still overestimating the people that are similar to you. Because the people surrounding you, in your circles of work and socialising, will tend to be a bit like you. But you're not accounting for the people in entirely different kinds of work, of radically different ages, working in countries other than your own, with different wealth and different values.
People do, always, think there are more people with similar views to themselves than is actually the case.
When a statistic comes along, it's OK to be sceptical. To go and research other stats for comparison. But disbelieving a stat because it doesn't match your own experience is wrong-headed. It's mistaking anecdote for data.
Because the people surrounding you, in your circles of work and socialising, will tend to be a bit like you.
Which is why i mentioned an industry I'm in: cellular. I see and work with a lot people. The client base is from all walks of life.
But you're not accounting for the people in entirely different kinds of work, of radically different ages,
I repeat myself: The client base I'm drawing my observation from is all walks of life. Plumbers. Retired people. Young families. Real estate agents. Firefighters. Fishermen. Asians, East Indians, Iranians, Joe Sixpack, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and Jehovah's Witnesses.
working in countries other than your own
Most of Apple's sales and profits are in the States, so the fact that my observations aren't reflecting what people in Uganda do with iphones isn't really relevant to THIS particular conversation.
But disbelieving a stat because it doesn't match your own experience is wrong-headed.
Thank you captain obvious. I never said anywhere that I don't beleive apples total revenues are 10$Billion, nor have i said that I don't beleive that they have hit 40$billion downloads. I said that i didn't beleive 1 in 4 downloads was paid, and was skeptical that even 1 in 20 downloads was paid.
But nobody ever provided any data suggesting that those were in fact the rates. I merely speculated on some average app prices for paid apps, did the math, and noted that the numbers did not jive with my experience.
But while the conclusion did not line up with my expectations, no one had ever asserted that the conclusion was in fact true, so disbelieving is hardly irrationally refuting a "properly researched study".
That said my followup digging around confirms that yes, that $10Billion revenue includes in app purchases, and that in-app purchases are in the billions, and are claimed by some to be more profitable than paid apps.
That lets us model things a bit differently and brings the ratio of paid apps to free apps in those download statistics far lower, if half the revenue is accounted by in-app purchases.
That could bring us to the ballpark of as few as 1 in 50 apps downloaded being paid apps, which is a lot more plausible.
It's mistaking anecdote for data.
In this case no mistake of that kind was made.
The payment card industry negotiates rates based on many things...
Agree... But as an indie developer, credit card payment will cost you around 3% + 30 cent (using Google Checkout, Paypal or Amazon...).
Surely, 30% is more... depending on the app price... But for apps around 1 USD it's hard to do cheaper on your own.
Unless, you're a big company.