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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

I use https://paddle.com/ for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/).

The major reason I use Paddle over Stripe is Paddle deal with all EU VAT and other country specific tax + admin for you which Stripe still don't (as far as I know). If you're a small team or solo, you really don't want to be burdened with the extra work here and the scope for complicated and scary tax related mistakes.

Each month Paddle send me a single payment and I record those as business income - that's it, done.

Edit: Pricing is 5% + $0.50 per transaction. As far as I know, Fastspring is more expensive and Gumroad is cheaper, and both take care of tax for you the same as Paddle.

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Sean, thanks for the reply. I think we might be in the same boat here, if I am understanding you right. To clarify: Are you saying that you are in the EU, or your service is based in EU, or are you saying that your customers are in the EU?

EDIT: Currently browsing Paddle.com where I clicked the "Explore Paddle" link, which 404's for me here https://paddle.com/demo/explore-paddle/ (fails with the error 'We can’t connect to the server at fast.wistia.com.') https://paddle.com/resources/revenue-delivery-explained/ (also down for the same reason, wistia)

I also clicked the "Sales Questions" button, in an attempt to notify, but it appears that button doesn't lead me anywhere.

Can anybody verify if those two items function for them?

I'm based in the UK, selling worldwide (with some exceptions https://paddle.com/support/countries-supported/).

Even before Brexit, if you wanted to sell digital goods to EU countries, you had to charge each country different VAT rates, register for VAT collection etc. Other countries have their own tax rules and other obligations too. Paddle lets me ignore all the admin for this which is awesome.

Does anyone know what you would do if you sold a product worldwide for a year while ignoring all this? Would you be in a real mess?

We have a saying in Germany for this called „Wo kein Kläger, da kein Richter“ roughly translated „no plaintiff, no judge“. I think it highly depends on how much you’re actually selling, if you’re only within the free limits or just marginal above I’d say nobody cares (for the EU at least).

I’d not recommend it because the tax office knows no mercy, better to go with a merchant of record.

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