Conveyor solves out-of-store distribution and update (albeit, it's not been tested with Tauri specifically yet). You can then have the app check for a license on startup. Stripe integration isn't a lot of coding and the financial overheads are lower than with the app store.
Thanks, but I could probably save time by just using Stripe with the existing Tauri app. Tauri already supports notarised apps, auto-updaters etc... What it doesn't support is generating a properly signed .pkg file.
(this can be done using regular shell script, in my case there is, however, some weird, hard to debug issue with AppStore validation)
The missing bit is making the app paid, which normally should be trivial with the AppStore.
https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/4415
TBF I wouldn't bother with the Mac AppStore if there was a simple way of distributing paid versions of the desktop app without much coding involved.