An App Store rejection costs you time, not money. Apple does not charge for resubmission and rejections are routine rather than a mark against you. What they cost is days of calendar at the point in a project when the schedule has the least slack, and the expensive ones are almost always predictable before submission.
What actually happens
You submit. Review takes a day or two. If something fails, you receive a message naming the guideline and usually a screenshot. You fix it and resubmit, and the clock starts again.
One rejection on a first submission is close to normal. Two is common. The problem is not the rejection, it is that most teams submit for the first time about a week before they intended to launch, so each cycle eats the entire remaining buffer.
The rejections that cost the most
The app does not do enough
Apple declines apps that are essentially a website in a wrapper or that offer little beyond what a web page provides. This is the most expensive rejection because the fix is not a change, it’s a rethink.
It is also entirely predictable. If your app’s value is content that could be a responsive site, that question should be settled during scoping rather than by a reviewer.
Sign in required for no reason
If content can be shown without an account, requiring one to get past the first screen is a rejection. Reviewers test this directly.
The fix is usually straightforward, letting people see something before registering, and it improves the product anyway.
Privacy declarations that do not match behavior
Increasingly the most common category, and increasingly strictly enforced. Your declaration must cover everything your app collects, including what third party SDKs collect on your behalf.
Cheap to prevent by auditing dependencies before submission. Painful to fix afterward under time pressure.
Broken things a reviewer found in ninety seconds
Placeholder text, a crash on a specific device, a dead link in the settings screen, a demo account that does not work. Reviewers are thorough in a way teams testing their own app are not, because they have no idea which paths are the intended ones.
The prevention is a demo account that definitely works, a build tested on a real device rather than a simulator, and someone who has never used the app trying to break it.
How to reduce this to near zero
Read the guidelines against your feature list at the start of the project, not at the end. Most costly rejections are architectural and only cheap to address before the code exists.
Submit earlier than you need to. A submission two or three weeks ahead of your launch date turns a rejection from a crisis into an ordinary task. You control the release date separately from the approval date, so approval early costs nothing.
Provide reviewer notes. Explain anything unusual, supply working credentials, and say what to test. Reviewers are working quickly and clarity genuinely helps.
Include everything that is required. Privacy policy URL, support URL, accurate declarations, complete metadata. Most of a launch is this chain rather than the code.
If you are rejected
Read the actual guideline number they cite rather than only the summary. Fix the specific thing. Do not resubmit with an argument attached unless you genuinely believe it is a misunderstanding, in which case the appeal process exists and works, and takes longer than fixing it.
Do not resubmit the same build hoping for a different reviewer. It is noticed.
Questions
Does being rejected hurt my chances later?
No. It is not a record held against the account. Repeatedly resubmitting without addressing the issue does attract attention.
How many rejections is normal?
Zero to two for a first submission from a team that read the guidelines. More than that usually indicates something structural about what the app is, rather than a series of small mistakes.
Can I appeal?
Yes, and appeals succeed when a reviewer misunderstood something. It takes longer than complying. Worth using when you are confident and the change would be significant, not as a first response.
If you are scoping an app and want the compliance chain considered before the code is written, that is how these projects should start.
