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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that Paddle becomes a middle man in the transaction taking on all international tax responsibility. They pay you out after paying all tax/vat local to the customer. This massively simplifies international sales, particularly for EU business.

I also believe that an awful lot of small online SASS and digital good sales by companies are committing (unintentional) tax fraud in the countries of their customers.

I hate trying to understand vat/sales tax on digital goods, to the point that it has until now discouraged me from starting that sort of business on my own. With Paddle I wouldn't have to even think about it.

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A simple solution is to do a b2b company only and thanks the EU for complicating the situation so much. Another thing I used to do was to just sell to everyone except European customers (explicitly written on the website).

The funniest thing is that the EU ostensibly did it to make "Amazon pay their fair share" while most small merchants that used to run e-commerce have moved to sell on Amazon or eBay just not to have to keep up with all the regulations and bs.

I believe that two some extent these sort of regulations are lobbied for in the background by large corporations in order to make it harder for small business to enter the market. If they are going to get regulated anyway best make it to their own advantage!

EU generally can’t make good (tech) legislation. Cookie law is the goto example. It’s too complicated. Too many cooks.

They tend to take a defensive approach to restrict outsiders, since most tech innovation isn't happening locally

More like: US companies can't handle good tech legislation, which the EU makes. I enjoy my rights. And "cookie law" is very simple.

If your idea of "good legislation" is "bureaucratic hellpit that promises the solution to all problems to the electorate, but in reality just makes things slightly more expensive to big companies and destroys any chance of smaller players to disrupt the market", then yes, EU legislation is great.

Cookie law is "simple", but what does it achieve? How are our lives better after knowing that every website uses cookies? Is there any website you thought "oh wow, they are telling me they are using cookies, this totally changes my perception of how they operate!"?

GDPR is the same: did it make any difference in the amount of surveillance capitalism we are subject to? No! Did it make any of the sites you use to reduce the amount of data collected? No! Did it make money for a fuckton of lawyers who went after Small/Medium Businesses who had a website and had no idea if they were complying or not, leading the majority of them to just close down and move to Facebook Pages? Of course it did!

GDPR: At least you have the means to hold a company accountable in the EU, without spending a shitton of money on lawyers. In the US it's like the wild west. Steal as much data as possible, without any repercussions whatsoever. Neutered congress and other amusing institutions add to the mix.

I think you are missing the point. You can have all the "accountability" you want, in practical terms, nothing has changed. Your data is still being taken and exploited, but now thanks to the bureaucracy we can no longer say that it is being "stolen".

It's akin to saying that assault is now okay because the people are being forced to sign consent forms before getting punched in the face.

> A simple solution is to do a b2b company only

“Simply change your entire business model or build a different product”

> Another thing I used to do was to just sell to everyone except European customers

“Just ignore the entire EU market for whatever you’re selling”

This isn’t a serious post right? Or I guess, it’s actually a classic HN counter-post.

How does you stopping selling in ~30 EU countries, help you with being tax and law compliant in the other 150+ countries?

You still have to know and understand your legal/tax responsibilities when selling to businesses in Singapore, South Korea, Australia etc.

This.

(B2B Saas founder here)

People often ask me why PartsBox doesn't offer inexpensive B2C plans to hobbyists and I have to explain that it would not make business sense: the costs of dealing with the idiotic EU VAT MOSS rules would exceed the revenue from subscriptions. Plus it would take a significant amount of time, effort and maintenance to support, thus presenting opportunity costs.

If you run a B2B business, things are reasonably straightforward (although still far from obvious), but B2C is a nightmare in the EU (as a side note, I have no idea how people expect to run sustainable small B2C businesses, this is really difficult).

Also, Paddle might be the only reasonable solution, because they do the invoicing themselves. If you can accept that your customers will be getting invoices from someone else, this simplifies things a lot. There is no company that does invoicing for your SaaS correctly if you are based in some EU countries, even though many claim to do so.

Exactly. Paddle saves me so much time and money. I couldn’t even imagine what my accountant would bill for something similar.

Does the 5% + 50c include the whole payment process on top of the tax-handling? As in, the alternative is paying 2-3% anyway to someone like Stripe for integrating payments, so that the cost of off-loading all int'l VAT and co headaches is around 2-3% (the 50c is negligible for my use case)?

Yes.

I'm so glad I've read this today. I've been thinking about building a little SaaS product and one of the aspects putting me off was the VAT/Sales Tax problem. I'm a stickler for the rules, I don't feel comfortable YOLOing something like that the way so many seem to be.

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