Our experience with Stripe Atlas (2017)
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
Happy to hear from people in EU that made this work and what are the total costs (especially tax-wise in your own country).
That makes sense. After all you have assets abroad now, parts in a company. The company’s revenue will be taxed in the U.S., but if you pay yourself dividends these can also be taxed at home. Even if you don’t pay yourself anything, I imagine in most countries you have to disclose that you have assets abroad. That makes your individual tax returns more complicated—that being said, if you feel up to it you could still do them yourself of course.
For example, if a company is incorporated in the US, but all it's employees/owners are physically located in Germany, then under German law, the "place of ordinary business" is Germany, and the company gets taxed as though it's a German company.
I believe the same sort of principal applies in most jurisdictions.
You need a permanent office - that is, employees that generate revenue for the company in the US - for the Spanish government to consider whether you can pay taxes in the US or in Spain.
Note that this varies from country to country depending on the double taxation agreements between countries [1]
[1] http://www.agenciatributaria.es/AEAT.internet/en_gb/Inicio/L...
My most optimistic first year in revenue would be $30-60k, still well in side business territory. Am I missing something, or is Atlas not for me?
As I imagine the OP of this comment is, I am a US citizen who was primarily interested in Atlas because it seems like the most painless solution.
A rule I had in my business was “Don’t talk about timelines until you’re ready to ship, because they only slip, and then people are sad.” I broke the rule several times, and regretted it every time. Stripe has the same rule, but is disciplined about keeping it.
I have a lot of thoughts on the C corporation vs LLC tradeoffs and while I’d love to put them in an HN comment my top task this week is putting them in a more permanent location.
We try to work with banking partners to put together an offering which works for the broadest selection of users, across geographies, business models, and personal circumstances. This is a perpetual work-in-progress.
but you're right, it's not well-suited for a small business owned by one person.
Also, if you are working in California, I believe you can waive the first year of foreign franchise tax.
In this day and age, there are very few cases where forming a corporation, taxed as a C Corp is an ideal structure for most businesses starting out.
I switched over to Capital One Spark Business Checking and highly recommend them instead.
Does Stripe get huge kickbacks from SVB or something?
Basically don't make a subsidiary, make two corps and sell the IP from the Canadian corp to the American one then license it back with a contract between the two corps. Then you set the same shareholders for both corps. As long as you are paying licensing costs for the IP to the American corp from the operating company within reasonable rates everyone is happy. Management fees / fees associated with the IP corp (costs related to the board, raising capital, non-managerial CEO work) get paid from the IP corp, and the rest gets paid from the operating company in Canada.
But note that as soon as you create an American corp all of your tax planning and accounting fees will essentially 10x and if you don't do things carefully you'll miss out on your one time capital gains exemption or other CCPC goodies, like bulk asset sale dividend tax reductions. Get a tax attorney and game it out ahead of time.
Regarding why to do it, is there a reason you can't just stand up the DE C and that IP agreement as part of the funding round instead of having it in place before?
Personally, my current company is staying 100% Canadian. The headaches dealing with the American tax system aren't worth it. If the revenue is there the capital isn't far behind, and I rather spend time optimizing the revenue of the company than getting slowed down with lawyers and tax attorneys plus I trust Canada's judicial system more than I do America's. Not by a lot, but still.
All this doesn't really matter if you're pre-product market fit or pre-monetization though. In that case it's almost always better to just set up the DE C because you have less leverage / allure.
There's mention here about difficulties getting a UK bank account but I can't speak to that as I'm UK based. For me, as a UK-er, I got a business account (and a credit card at different bank) within a few days and I've never had to do anything in person. Total cost being the £14 for company reg (and later accountant fees because I'm bad at that). For what it's worth, my personal credit was below the toilet when I did all this as well, so no sweetheart Mr Moneybags dealing either.
In short, starting a limited company in the UK still seems to be fairly easy, but getting access to other facilities such as banking may be a different story if you're doing something unusual.
I'm also not quite sure how they get around the anti-laundering rules that everyone else has to abide by. They mention checking various possible IDs, but what they say they need doesn't meet the standards that every other bank and financial service we've ever worked with would require, which makes me a bit suspicious about corner-cutting.
Indeed. This is one of those things that is a massive, nonobvious competitive advantage for Anglosphere countries - most have an incorporation system that works for really tiny businesses, and there are very few requirements for notaries or similar. There really isn't a good reason for company registration to have non trivial costs.
Companies House will do it for £12. There are third parties who will do the registration through their API for even less, somehow. And the UK is also quite good at legal recognition for unincorporated members' associations (useful if you want a local nonprofit org).
In California for instance, you can set up an LLC in about 5 minutes for $70. It requires filing out one form with the name of your business and the owners and mailing it in (takes a few weeks to process). In many other states you can do this online.
Once you have your Articles of Organization, you can take them to any bank and open a bank account with a credit card in about 30 minutes.
Every time I follow links to Atlas, the experience always ends with the "Request to join" signup form.
That form is the primary way most people get access; we invite almost everyone whose business we could accept within 48 hours of hitting submit on it. (We do a very coarse filter on “Is this business obviously unsupportable for legal or policy reasons? No? OK, invite them to send us a full application.”)
Is Stripe Atlas the best solution?
I am starting two very modest side business intending to sell to international customers (mostly US+Canada initially). One SaaS and one content membership.
Any ideas?
What a coincidence, huh?
In the beginning I also considered Atlas, but that seemed way too much trouble and expenses for two businesses that may or may not be viable.
In the end, I decided to go with Paddle (https://paddle.com/). The integration was really easy, it is just a button that links to my subscription plans (with webhooks that alert my server when subscriptions are created and paid).
As Brazilians say, we should "exchange stickers".
But sure, my email is in my profile!
Thanks for the Paddle recommendation.
You will probably need an accountant in Brazil to see how you declare your business entity in the US and also an accountant in the US to declare you US taxes.
Send me an email after doing so (my email address is my HN handle at stripe.com) and I'll talk to the team running it to make sure you get access expeditiously. (Offer open to anyone on HN.)
Would be great to have Stripe in at least one country on the continent!
We want to be able to support entrepreneurs and businesses substantially everywhere. We don't talk about concrete timelines externally until we have something ready to show, because that is pure downside for our users if e.g. priorities change, a country launch gets delayed due to issues beyond our control, etc.
When we have plans for infrastructure that we can roll out in a fashion which is predictable enough to be viable to build a business on top of, you'll hear about it in all the usual places. Until then, https://stripe.com/global#za and Atlas are your best options.
You will probably want advice from an accountant local to your foreign employee as to how to comply with local laws to employ them, including making the relevant tax payments.