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Comment by test6554 | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like Avalara costs $50 per year for small businesses, but scales up for larger companies. So compliance is trivial if it truly works.

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The mental overhead of tracking compliance requirements (and finding service providers to meet them) dwarfs the monetary cost.

If compliance were required to this new extent, then avalara could likely raise prices

And if that happens then certainly competitors would enter the market. If avalara is overpriced people will switch over.

Unfortunately they don’t have transparent pricing. So it’s a bit of a mystery. We were in the middle of getting a quote but then found TaxJar thanks to this thread and are going to try that. I prefer the pricing being up front.

FWIW, I can tell you that taxjar is pretty light on the "I've collected taxes, now what?" side. Avalara might be a BigCo but they have their stuff together, and it works at scale for transactions (especially when dealing with refunds or discounts that need to reflect Sales Tax differentially.... oy)

Can you expand on why TaxJar seems lighter after collecting sales tax? We have a fully automated reporting and filing solution that works at scale for over 10k merchants.

Disclaimer: I work at TaxJar, just curious to hear your feedback. Thanks!

Yeah, i had a client using it who found that being able to get the data into a reporting scenario so they could file was hard. Mostly it surrounded reconciliation and an ability to gain confidence that the numbers reflected actual transaction volume (it is a perishable good, so there was a reasonable quantity of discounts and refunds as delivery vendors missed targets...)

I'd also say I have a bias, as I've also used avalara a couple times before and found it to be quite a bit superior in making it seem quite a bit more effortless -- taxation is so byzantine I don't have any expectation that I could understand it, so I want to trust that the provider i use is very confident they do.

not sure if that helps a lot, but it was also a few months ago ;)

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