Apple Developer Program Enrollment charged me but the purchase failed

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Level 2

196 points

Apple Developer Program Enrollment charged me but the purchase failed

Today I was going to subscribe to the Apple Developer Program since I have an app that I want to distribute to App Store. Everything went fine in the enrollment process, until I had to pay. For Christmas, I had received a physical Apple Gift Card of 1000 SEK (≈100 USD) and therefore had this on my Apple-ID's gift card balance. I had already spent 49 SEK of the gift card balance on an app subscription. However, when I tried to enroll in the Apple Developer Program, Apple took the remaining 951 SEK from the gift card balance (it's gone from my account now), and also took 44 SEK from my bank account to add up to the total of 995 SEK per year the membership costs here in Sweden. What should I do? I want my gift card balance back, my 44 SEK to my bank account and a working way to pay since this is obviously a bug caused by someone at Apple not thinking about how the Apple Developer app should behave if there's a gift card balance on the Apple-ID account. I have not gotten an email regarding the transaction, and I can't seem to continue the enrollment from my Mac.

Purchase failed error message.

Since I had 951 SEK left on my gift card balance, Apple took 44 SEK from my bank account.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on Jan 24, 2024 3:33 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

MrHoffman

Community+ 2025

Level 10

144,283 points

Jan 24, 2024 6:48 PM in response to FilipOfficial

You will need to discuss this with Apple Developer Support. Nobody around here can assist with issues with developer program enrollment. We’re other users, and some here are third-party developers. Not Apple.

In general, and some or all of this may or will not apply to this particular case…

You will need a major, internationally-recognized payment card associated with the Apple ID. Don’t bother trying to use an Apple ID balance or an Apple Gift Card to enroll. That won’t work.

Traditionally, you will also need an email-format Apple ID, and not an Apple ID that is a mobile telephone number.

Do not use a VPN client when enrolling in the program.

A few folks have had issues receiving telephone calls from international numbers, as well. If you need to contact Apple Developer Support, they may (will?) need to call you back. The number you provide must be reachable from wherever Apple is calling from.

If you are located in India, you must enroll via the Apple Developer app.

Paid program members can be individual developers, or can be certain legally-recognized organizations. The latter enrollment path requires a DUNS number.

You will need to be in a country or region where Apple is active, and will need to be someone or some legal entity that Apple can legally do business with; not a denied person or denied entity.

Here is the Exhibit A list of countries and regions:

https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/terms/exhibits/Exhibits-to-Schedule-2-and-3-20230828-English.pdf

If you want to keep things separate (as can be reasonable for many cases), creating a new Apple ID and enrolling that in the program, and using that (just) for Developer and App Store activities and such. You can enroll your own Apple ID (this works fine!), but that can get tangled with whatever personal info and purchases are already associated with your Apple ID. Apple has gotten better about allowing you to transfer one or more of your apps to other developers as needed, though.

If enrollment issues persist, contact Apple Developer Support:

Support - Apple Developer

Additional enrollment info, per Apple:

Before You Enroll - Apple Developer Program

Enrollment - Support - Apple Developer

System Status - Apple Developer (the servers must not be wobbling)

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Answer 2

FilipOfficial Author

Level 2

196 points

Jan 26, 2024 12:12 PM in response to MrHoffman

Hello MrHoffman,

Thank you for your reply. I wasn't trying to pay for the Apple Developer Program via the Apple Gift Card, it was Apple who withdraw from that card even though they write on their page that they don't take money from Apple Gift Cards. I also meet all of the requirements you specify, like having an email as my Apple-ID, having a internationally-recognized payment card, I'm not using a VPN etc.

I've tried to enroll over 30 times now from both my Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it doesn't work no matter what I do. I reached out to Apple support a week ago and they don't reply.

There's hundreds of threads online (including on this forum), and hundreds of users in every single one of these threads having the same issue: Apple won't accept the enrollment, they don't tell you why and never responds to emails. It seems like the common factor is that Apple is making it impossible for individual developers to enroll. Here's a list of people with the same issue I found in a quick Google search:

...and these results are just from the first search page on Google, if I go to the second page on Google there's hundreds (if not thousands) of threads like this both on this Apple Developer Forum, but also on other websites like Reddit.

Apple, wake up, and fix this!

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Apple Developer Program Enrollment charged me but the purchase failed

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