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Comment by theflyinghorse | Hacker News Reader

The feature is of course very nice, but the pricing is steep at 0.5% of your transactions. So I'm giving away 0.5% of my revenue (provided all of my revenue comes from sales) for the privilege of having my taxes calculated? That's on top of the 2.9%+30c per transaction that I already pay stripe?

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Correct. But that's not what you're paying for of course, you're paying for the fact that you don't need to pay an accountant to double check these numbers: if they are wrong and the tax man comes after you, you get to hold Stripe accountable for any and all repercussions. You are paying Stripe--if you so choose--to take on the legal responsibility of getting it right.

> if they are wrong and the tax man comes after you, you get to hold Stripe accountable for any and all repercussions. You are paying Stripe to take on the legal responsibility of getting it right.

Where exactly is this stated? As far as I can tell, all this does is say what taxes you should be collecting, and then collect them. It doesn't even handle (at this point) remitting payment to the appropriate jurisdications.

I see no evidence that if your taxes are collected wrong, Stripe will do anything other than say "Your accountant should have caught that, sorry." I see no evidence that by using this product, Stripe will indemnify you against tax issues (which yes, would go a long way to justifying the cost)

This is specially valuable if you are selling your product across multiple countries, which may have different taxes.

Is that legally binding somewhere? If they completely miss out that we were meant to collect X% for a municipality, will they be covering that out of their pocket?

I don't really think you're paying for accountability. That would involve some serious risk taking on Stripe side. I see no mention of this in the marketing material.

That’s also on top of Stripe Checkout (0.5%) and on top of Stripe Radar (0.5%). Stripe cuts about 5% of every SaaS in the end. That’s a lot of money.

Hey! Kelly from Stripe here: Just to clarify, there's no additional cost for using Checkout, and Radar is per small per transaction fee (or included free with Stripe if you're just starting out!), not a variable 0.5% fee.

Thanks for clarifying! That’s something I was looking at on the landing page and didn’t find that. So Checkout already includes Stripe Tax at no additional cost. That’s great to hear

> So Checkout already includes Stripe Tax at no additional cost. That’s great to hear

I am no Stripe pricing authority, and have no relation to the company, but I'm pretty sure that is *not* what she said.

She said that Checkout does not have an additional cost on top of transactions fees, not that Tax does not have an additional cost.

It seems like the thing that makes it steep is the percentage rather than a charge per transaction, right? Philosophically it's geared to the total value you generate rather than the value they provide to you.

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