Hacker News Reader

Hi, dev here, thanks for the input!

Fruits is a pivot for fanbase.com which sadly didn't make it. Within a few days, we managed to build fruits and launched it as the quickest MVP we could come up with. That's what you're seeing today. The imprint still points towards the current legal entity (fanbase GmbH). A new legal entity is currently under registration by the founders. Once the paperwork is done, the founders will move all assets to the new company and align the imprint accordingly.

Concerning taxation: this seems to be a clear improvement we need to work on communicating. Taxation is hard and we tried to break it down in a pricing calculator (which does not yet seem to do all that good of a job, point taken).

Disclaimer - as mentioned below/above in some of the comments: not the tax attorney ;-)

We are working with a tax office that helped us figuring out international taxation and will be able to answer all legal taxation questions in detail for each single country we're in business with.

Taxation for fruits essentially means:

- fruits charges the buyer and applies tax applicable for fruits (company in Germany) and the buyer in country XYZ

- each buyer will receive an invoice (issued by fruits)

- the seller will receive a single credit note for all sales performed within a month targeting a German company (fruits)

[Buyer] <<- Invoice (Tax) --- [fruits] <<- Credit note ->> [Seller]

I’ve used this before with good success on a few projects

https://www.taxjar.com/product/api

After a quick browse of the Tax Jar website I got the solid impression that they were US only. I saw mention of 'sales tax' but nothing about VAT, GST, HST, etc. No mention of international or shipping. And their pricing page which I normally find to be useful for this type of thing was actually totally confusing to me.

The one thing on the pricing page that jumped out at me was, "AI-driven product taxability recommendations"

AI recommendations and dealing with the tax authorities doesn't really seem like a sound choice.

As someone who builds multiple products in this space, make sure you check if a credit note is valid for your purpose. It's not in NL, and it would get you in trouble with the tax authority. The proper solution is a self-billed invoice (though perhaps you're using that and just calling it a credit note!)

> Once the paperwork is done, the founders will move all assets to the new company and align the imprint accordingly.

Make sure that you deal with IP rights very carefully in that situation.

Also, the GP is right, you do need that impressum page.

This kind of bureaucracy is why our business is registered out of Germany, haha.

Edit: I’m not vouching for anyone not following the law. But I do think the rules are much easier to understand and follow in other EU countries.

I am working on a SaaS product with a friend that will be mostly a B2B (although it can work as B2C too) and besides all the tech, what I am afraid mostly is all the tax/money/stuff.

I am not from Europe neither USA - I'd like only to get paid monthly for the service I provide. Is it difficult? If anyone can give some advice I'd be grateful.

take a look at getrevin.com - basically an MoR (taxes,filing etc) but you can use Stripe - and they can serve you in countries that Stripe can't.

It really boils down to the country.IMHO, German tax system is madly complicated but Estonian is super simple, for example.

> what I am afraid mostly is all the tax/money/stuff

You shouldn't be afraid, you should pay a professional CPA and/or tax accountant to take care of all of that stuff for you.

You wouldn't draft your own legal documents (I hope), correct? It's no different on the money side of things.

At that point it almost doesn't matter if they draft them themselves as they won't have the energy/money to chase some vendor/partner etc legally as a day 0 startup.

I pay my taxes locally. The issue is what happens for the other companies in other countries, do they need something special?

You could look into a UAE freezone.

> what I am afraid mostly is all the tax/money/stuff.'

At fruits, we are automatically handling all the taxes & invoicing for you - internationally & correctly, so you don't have to be afraid of making illegal billing mistakes. It's all handled for you, you and your customers automatically receive an automated invoice / billing overview. :-)

You sound like a user that expects the world for your $20/month business. These red flags could be corrected in a day.

I think they sound like a user who expects the service to follow German and EU rules and regulations when on a German domain, which sounds not like the world but common sense.

Also "for your $20 month business"? I mean I guess he expects it for everyone's $20 month business.

This thread (and it being upvoted to the top) is a prime example of why there isn't any Big Tech in EU - because we slam down even fun little startups with this legalese bullshit as soon as they appear.

The 24 Unicorns in Germany https://www.failory.com/startups/germany-unicorns

Yeah lol, 24? With the size of German economy it should be 240 or 2400, definitely not 24. (if it was irony then I'm sorry I didn't recognize it)

you're correct 240 if you say well the American economy is 10 times the size of the German (it's a little over 12 I think) but I wonder if we might see that the rate of German unicorns is growing at about the level it should be in recent years, that is to say the disparity in number of Unicorns is more Germany starting late than anything else.

Aside from that of course the EU has made it relatively clear it does not really want unicorns like Twitter or Facebook. So I mean if you take away PII violating companies from the mix then things might look more equal also - but perhaps that is more of that pesky legalese bullshit you seem to find onerous.

US GDP is between 6 and 8 times Germany .. so should be like around 80-60 unicorns

But then .. you have Israel who has a 10 times smaller economy per GDP size and still managed 17 unicorns ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yours is probably more accurate than mine, I saw a 2019 estimate said 2 point something trillion and then U.S 24 point something trillion, but I didn't look really close.

hmm, yeah maybe it doesn't matter so much the GDP size - does Israel have a lot of legalese bullshit?

on edit: changed petty regulations to legalese bullshit. Couldn't remember the exact phrase this far down.

It's very funny to speak about privacy while the EU is pushing literal Chat Control at the same time.

I'd much rather have Big Tech and the money it brings home - nobody is forced to use their free services, I'm simply avoiding them - than have Chat Control forced down my throat unless I move to the Land of Free PII Violations.

The 20 in 8 times smaller Israel:

https://www.failory.com/startups/israel-unicorns

all i can hear is "if only the whole world was as unregulated as the US"-mimimi

The US is plenty regulated. It's why VCs have to spend absurd sums on lawyers for Uber and Airbnb. Sidestepping laws and regulations isn't cheap.

EU is so backwards with bureaucracy it is actually easier to set up a US entity for a new startup and hire EU devs in it than set up in an EU country and navigate the tax laws of 28 countries.

"legalese bullshit" - you sell a product, you need to handle VAT. Every single business in the EU abides by this, why should a business be exempt just because they're on the internet?

That's not true, there's a rather large minimum until you need to think about VAT. 100k EUR/year where I live.

Not since last year

https://vat-one-stop-shop.ec.europa.eu/index_en

Lol, "simpler and fairer world"? I want some of what these people are smoking.

I'm a VAT payer and it's at minimum 15-20 incredibly complicated accounting forms per year, with harsh penalties for mistakes and missed deadlines. I would never be able to start doing business if I had to do this at the beginning, and I'm in the most lucrative market today - and I would never risk it too, the fines are damn huge.

Doing the forms costs me thousands of euro yearly even though my accounting is totally simple, I have just few invoices per month with just few line items.

As I said, this is why this place is failing business-wise.

I'm in Denmark, which I would not have expected to be the simplest place for taxes, but evidently it must be because I don't have any of these problems you do with VAT, although I only invoice one time per month it's true so maybe that is the difference.

Can you tell me about other countries requiring an impressum? .. I think Switzerland..?

US businesses - afaik - are not required to collect sales tax out of state below a threshold of 100k per year per state. So yeah, the parent comment is valid. A bit of pro-new-business flexibility wouldn't hurt in Europe.

He sounds like someone who knows what they're looking for and is diligently inspecting the service before spending money on it. It doesn't matter how insignificant the amount of money is, it's important to be clear on what you are actually buying and if it's actually legit.