Stripe acquires Lemon Squeezy
lemonsqueezy.com
lemonsqueezy.com
Sad to see lemon squeezy acquired by stripe.
To the extent they've made errors, I'd like to see you do better. The scale is enormous, there are fraudsters coming at you left and right. It's not an easy game to play.
Even with this being the justification, they could just say they won't be working with the customer in the future, not literally steal their customer's already earned money.
Just the other day I was buying an NFT and I realized I bought the currency on Ethereum instead of Polygon. Coinbase didn't differentiate. Imagine trying to explain all this shit to your grandma.
No, most of the merchant's risk with credit cards is from the design of credit cards. You have to give your payment info to every merchant but if any one of them loses it then anyone who gets it can use it at any other merchant. Then some merchant you've never heard of has bad security, criminals get cards from there and use them to buy things from honest merchants and the honest merchants get chargebacks for having done nothing wrong.
Cryptocurrency does not have this problem because you don't have to give your private keys to everyone you pay and even if you fail to protect them yourself (something you, rather than someone else, is in control of), as long as you're not trying to use cryptocurrency as a store of value instead of a payment system, your losses are limited to the e.g. $20 you had in your wallet. Customers have no problem with systems that work like this, like cash.
Chargebacks are only an issue if the customer expects the merchant to be dishonest and the value of the purchase is large. If you pay $3 for something and get ripped off, the ability to do a chargeback isn't that relevant to your life and you're just not going to patronize them anymore.
The reason most customers don't use cryptocurrency is that the government made it high friction for ordinary people to buy it. "Why is this website I don't know asking for my social security number? I'm just trying to make a small purchase."
Presumably at the behest of the existing payments industry which wants to keep their vig.
Starting like that, writing that whole paragraph and you completely misread what I said. "No, merchants have risk with credit cards". That is literally what I said in the post you are replying too. Sloppy and rude.
>Cryptocurrency does not have this problem because you don't have to give your private keys to everyone you pay and even if you fail to protect them yourself
Credit card fraud isn't a problem for consumers because of chargebacks and insurance. If a criminal steals my card and racks up charges I am almost always getting my money back. All the risk is again on the merchants. Consumers like that balance. Trying to convince them to take on more risk just to benefit the merchants is not going to happen ever.
>Chargebacks are only an issue if the customer expects the merchant to be dishonest and the value of the purchase is large. If you pay $3 for something and get ripped off, the ability to do a chargeback isn't that relevant to your life and you're just not going to patronize them anymore.
This is also completely wrong. People do chargebacks all the time because of a poor outcome that has nothing to do with being dishonest. There are also cases like bankruptcy where a chargeback will get you your money back but if you paid in crypto you'd just be another creditor.
The reason most customers don't use cryptocurrencies is because they are stupid and pointless for payments. They make the process worse for consumers unless you're needing to hide your identity. Crypto is like mailing companies envelopes of cash. There is a reason no sane consumer does that anymore.
What you said was that it was moving the risk from the merchant to the consumer, but it isn't moving that risk, it's removing it because the consumer doesn't have to give every merchant something that enables that (very common) form of fraud to occur to begin with.
> Credit card fraud isn't a problem for consumers because of chargebacks and insurance.
It is though, because it raises costs, and therefore prices. This is indirect, but the merchant can make it direct by offering a better price for using a payment method that lowers their costs.
This is one of the reasons the credit card companies try to prohibit that price lowering to the extent that they can -- because they know that otherwise it would happen and be effective in reducing usage of their archaic fraud-prone system with high processing overhead.
> People do chargebacks all the time because of a poor outcome that has nothing to do with being dishonest.
This is called "chargeback fraud" and is dishonesty on the part of the customer. If you buy something which is accurately described and then don't like it, issuing a chargeback should be prevented.
> There are also cases like bankruptcy where a chargeback will get you your money back but if you paid in crypto you'd just be another creditor.
Which is another form of fraud by the customer, because in that circumstance you are a creditor. It's like going back to the store and taking the money you paid out of the till. You're not taking it back from the store, you're stealing it from their other creditors who are entitled to their proportionate share.
"Credit cards are good because they enable customers to commit fraud" seems more like an argument to make them go away.
> The reason most customers don't use cryptocurrencies is because they are stupid and pointless for payments.
They're a payment system you can't practically be denied the use of and isn't operated by an industry dedicated to capturing the government in order to keep you under surveillance and covertly extract a vig from everything you buy.
> They make the process worse for consumers unless you're needing to hide your identity.
What if you do want to hide your identity? It's certainly not a feature to the customer that credit card companies create a list of everything you buy and who you buy it from in the hands of a third party. Why should the customer want there be a third party keeping track of who buys politically sensitive literature or contraceptives or anything that reveals their realtime location?
> Crypto is like mailing companies envelopes of cash.
It's like paying for things in cash generally, which lots of people still do in various circumstances.
People don't typically mail cash because stamps are too expensive to use that for small purchases, there is a cap on claims if you use it for large purchases and the Post Office loses it, and mail is slow.
And even then, people will use it to pay for e.g. Mullvad.
It doesn't remove anything. The consumer is accepting the risk that they pay for something and don't receive it. You are just shifting the risk it is still there.
>This is called "chargeback fraud" and is dishonesty on the part of the customer.
No it isn't. Chargebacks aren't only for fraud or dishonesty on the part of the retailer they are for any situation when you don't believe you received what you paid for.
>Which is another form of fraud by the customer, because in that circumstance you are a creditor.
No because again the bankrupt company hasn't provided the service they took money for. Taking back the money isn't fraud.
>They're a payment system you can't be denied the use of and isn't operated by an industry dedicated to capturing the government in order to covertly extract a vig from everything you buy.
So you can be denied the use of most crypto in practical terms by having you address blacklisted in which case no mainstream exchange will accept your coins.
>What if you do want to hide your identity?
Then use crypto, but that isn't a concern for very many legitimate transactions.
>it's like paying for things in cash generally
It's like paying in cash remotely, hence mailing money. Paying in cash in person is fine because you are right there to collect your goods or confront the thief standing in front of you.
You believe the reason people don't pay for things by mailing cash is because of the cost of postage? Besides being ridiculous maybe check the cost of a bitcoin transaction during modest volume events.
The risk the merchant is trying to avoid is actually removed, not shifted to anyone. The risk that the customer pays for something and doesn't receive it is irrelevant for many transactions, because the seller is trustworthy and allows easy returns, so the risk from them isn't any higher than the risk of the credit card company not crediting your payment or sticking you with a surprise fee.
It also isn't inherent to cryptocurrency. There is no reason you can't use escrow if you feel the need to. But you could avoid the cost of that escrow, implicitly built into credit card networks and non-optional there, when you don't feel you need it.
> Chargebacks aren't only for fraud or dishonesty on the part of the retailer they are for any situation when you don't believe you received what you paid for.
https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-chargebacks/
> No because again the bankrupt company hasn't provided the service they took money for. Taking back the money isn't fraud.
Taking back money from a company in bankruptcy is typically illegal (and unethical) because their other creditors also have a claim to the money, so you're really taking it from them rather than the company who owes it to you. This is why bankruptcy courts exist; to fairly allocate the bankrupt entity's assets. You're not allowed to skip the line.
> So you can be denied the use of most crypto in practical terms by having you address blacklisted in which case no mainstream exchange will accept your coins.
Anybody can trivially get a new address and transfer their coins to it without the use of an exchange. Blacklisting every address that has received coins from a blacklisted address doesn't work because you don't need someone's permission to send them coins, so it would grant anyone with a blacklisted address the power to blacklist anyone else. Also, a blockchain is global and countries that don't respect the blacklist would cause the number of affected addresses to constitute the entire network within a short period of time.
> Then use crypto, but that isn't a concern for very many legitimate transactions.
Isn't it? Why would I want the credit card companies to even know if I'm buying a toothbrush? Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7258
> It's like paying in cash remotely, hence mailing money.
That's assuming you're using it remotely. If it wasn't made purposely inconvenient then you could use it to buy coffee or gas.
> Paying in cash in person is fine because you are right there to collect your goods or confront the thief standing in front of you.
People are perfectly willing to pay cash to someone who is bigger than them, or armed, so that can't really be it. Also, confronting them like a vigilante is hardly necessary when you know who they are and they're subject to legal process, which is the same over the internet.
And again this only seems to apply to someone you expect to rob you. Microsoft accepts cryptocurrency. You may not trust them at all, but if you pay them with it for a Windows license, what are you afraid will happen? Anything that couldn't also happen three months later after the chargeback window is closed?
> You believe the reason people don't pay for things by mailing cash is because of the cost of postage? Besides being ridiculous maybe check the cost of a bitcoin transaction during modest volume events.
If you're making a $2 transaction, spending $0.73 on postage and then waiting several days to be credited is ridiculous, not to mention most merchants don't accept it because it requires manual processing and presents an insider theft risk.
Bitcoin has high transaction costs because it's the oldest (and some of the ingroup likes it that way). There are several other cryptocurrencies where the transaction costs are trivial, it's not inherent to the technology.
That's true. How about if you're paying $3000? Would you like to pay with Bitcoin or a credit card?
Notice also that the argument I'm making isn't "you should never use a credit card", it's that cryptocurrency is sometimes better, and it wouldn't hurt if more places accepted it.
That's certainly not the reason I hear from people.
Crypto is useless for anyone but criminals. If you can't use the real, state controlled financial system, then you also can't use the real, state controlled property rights system. Who cares about being able to prove you own some bits if you are not protected by the law when you buy any actual tangible goods with those bits, like a house or a car or a business?
Crypto is only useful when it's not needed (ie, you can use the state to enforce your physical property rights) and becomes useless once it's needed (you live in a corrupt or anarchist state that won't enforce your property rights over anything you can actually buy with the crypto)
Crypto is becoming a form of government blind-eye-turned corruption, for carrying out corrupt financial practices with less immediate oversight and more ways to overcomplicate the logistics. It will probably cause a financial crisis one day, like in 2008, for the exact same reason complex derivatives did.
I never take crypto jobs so my resume will stay clean when the house of cards falls down.
Hope this helps. Take care now.
Plus, banks aren't allowed to just close their eyes and allow all money movement via ACH.
Private toll roads don't get to discriminate against traffic. Internet providers don't get to discriminate against traffic. Why should payment network providers? Once you're big enough and important enough, you're quasi-state.
Toll roads change price based on type of vehicle and don't allow all types of vehicles. Discrimination.
In most jurisdictions internet providers absolutely discriminate on traffic to help resolve congestion, they are allowed to discriminate for VOIP under various circumstances. Discrimination.
Visa and Mastercard don't want a bunch of charge backs, some services are more prone to fraud than others, and they flat out don't want their brand associated with various things. Discrimination.
With few exceptions (race, gender etc etc), discrimination is a net good for the world. People should be allowed to decide who they want to do business with, socialize with etc.
I suspect they can't capriciously tell you that you're not allowed on the road because they don't want to associate with you, as you are a "scumbag."
In some cases they are legally obliged to hold onto funds. The don't get to keep them.
You are putting yourself at risk of a lawsuit.
International remittance - atlantic money does $3 or something flat. By the time you get your cash into a crypto exchange and out, you are hosed for more than $3. If you can be bothered to open an account with someone like Interactive Brokers (yes, a traditional online stock brokerage) you can do it for about zero - you get wholesale FX prices and you can deposit/withdraw money from various accounts as long as you have all the paper work in place - annoying, but doable.
Again, a couple entries into relational databases, which is the true underlying cost structure of "traditional finance" is really hard to beat.
Why would you do that?
I don’t care for so much consolidation though.
Almost every case I've seen, it's almost always because they were dabbling with NSFW, Cannabis, or another card-network-restricted category. And when you confront them about their story, they almost always respond with weasel wording: "It wasn't really NSFW, or it was only a little NSFW, or it's not my responsibility if my users use it for NSFW..."
It's also not like this is buried in the Terms of Service with ambiguous legalese. Stripe has a pretty beautifully-formatted page clearly saying what they are not OK with.
Every single thing about these lists always reeks of ‘this has been put together reactively, over time, based on experience’. But it’s so cool and trendy and complain about this stuff on HN and similar, everyone just elects to forego critical thinking for a little bit.
I suspect (hope) Stripe Tax will soon offer a MoR service. I imagine this acquisition is mostly for their tax expertise & perhaps internal tools that do all the hard work behind the scenes.
Empty words.
Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record which means _they_ act as the merchant and sell the product to your customer. So they'll collect VAT and make sure it lands in the pockets of the right country etc. and will pay you only the remainder (minus their cut).
Since Lemon Squeezy uses Stripe under the hood as their payment processor you had to basically pay a cut to two companies if you used Lemon Squeezy but in exchange you literally have to worry about nothing. You just get a nice B2B reverse invoice and don't have to break your head around world wide (and especially EU) tax laws.
I really hope Stripe will double down on the whole MoR thing, it makes processing payments online so much nicer and less annoying.
PayPal, for all its faults, is still a far more universal option, but that means very little if people keep making Stripe-only tools. It has become a habit of mine to immediately look for the FAQ to see if PayPal is supported.
Zuck has shown the way.
Stripe is buying a lucrative business, but more importantly it is buying the complex knowhow of running an international tax-compliant merchant of record. They can then integrate this into their product. I switched to LemonSqueezy primarily out of concern for EU-wide tax ramifications (EU strikes again). Is there a reason to choose LemonSqueezy over Stripe if you are located in the US? There hasn't been a single VAT-compliance case to my knowledge and the need for MoR is unclear.
If anything, EU companies have it slightly easier because they can file all of their EU-based taxes using One Stop Shop.
Many of us are willing to pay for shipping and taxes up front just so their products don't get caught in the "free money for us" exploitation racket that is EU customs.
It's not just the EU that charges VAT (or VAT-like taxes).
Most countries (and in the US's case, subregions within) charge some form of sales tax that's a pain to manage yourself if you're not a huge operation.
Always good to comply with tax laws (if not for the obviously good moral/ethical reasons, then definitely for legal reasons!)
[1] https://www.taxjar.com/blog/saas-california-sales-tax [2] https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/lawguides/vol1/sutr/1502.html
Reduce the price to Stripe pricing + 1%, and this will be the default for everyone!
That’s a huge number of aspirational digital product vendors.
5 + 50 vs stripe’s lower direct take (for me 1.5 + 20). I just did a quick calculation on a really basic/modest digital product business. Sell something at €25 and sell €50k - 2000 customers. That’s going to be €7k with LSqz over a year, and with Stripe it’s going to be €1.15k
The difference is €16 a day.
The business makes you €137 a day.
If you spend a day each month sorting out admin and taxes because of stripe direct plus a few days paying a developer (you’re non-technical remember!) then that could easily be a cost of €5500 a year. Total cost including card processing is €6150 and it’s only €850 less than LemonSqueezy.
Why would you move?
And in particular why would you move sooner than 3 years if you are predicting similar revenue each year.
>Along the way, we received many acquisition offers and (Series A) term sheets from investors. But despite the allure of these opportunities, we knew that what we had built was truly special and needed the right partner to take it to the next level.
Wow. This is quite the smart and ballsy move. Congrats to the team. Looks like y'all knew what you were doing.
I found these surprising as I didn't see them mentioned on the pricing page near "Transaction fees ... 5% + 50¢" (https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/pricing).
I like to root for the home team (tech entrepreneurs like my former self getting paid out for taking a risk makes me happy)
M&A activity is a positive sign for the economy. Stripe wouldn’t be buying companies if they thought the economy was about to fall off a cliff, and Stripe is full of smart people (disclosure: I am a former Stripe).
If there were no acquisitions happening, starting (another) company would be much tougher to justify to my wife and my self.
A big whale company that gobbles up some of the fifty startups that only have like 2% of the market total is not a competitive market at all.
You cannot get acquired unless you represent a percentage of market share, have IP which will lead to greater market share, and/or have employees who can expand market share for a product.
>A big whale company that gobbles up some of the fifty startups that only have like 2% of the market total is not a competitive market at all.
A big whale company performing that many M&As to little startups is essentially fueling future competitors. If I was an investor I would see that market as valuable for the unicorn breakthrough possibility or at least an eventual acquisition exit event.
What an absolute load. They are stamping out competition, concentrating market power, and making red oceans even redder. If you were an investor I wouldn’t give you my money to gamble with.
From branding to the all UVP, it was a fast exit because it was meant to be.
Still a massive achievement
Selling your startup is not a good plan. Make it big, change the world, and swim in money.
they are looking at quick exits especially in this high interest rate environments and so are the backers
Very few entrepreneurs are looking to create companies that will provide its workers with forever jobs
It's sad but those few that are grinding it out and creating jobs, helping economies in those countries run proper are the unsung heroes.
Time will tell where this American greed will take Americans but so far, its not looking good.
VC does then choke out nascent companies in the "mid-sized, actually employs people" space if they think there's the potential for a quick buck, by driving it to zero, but the founders trying to do as you describe aren't anywhere near Y Combinator in the first place.
Sure buddy.
If you have a swimming pool worth of money, or a pond, or a canal, or a river, or maybe an ocean - you can swim in all these. Some founders maybe don't want to turn 58 trying to reach that perfect cubic m. volume of water to be able to swim. They might rather want to start swimming when they are kinda younger (30s maybe?). Who knows. And while already swimming they might want to get another pool, maybe an olympic size later and so on, instead of keep waiting for that "perfectly sized water body for them".
> change the world
Oh ffs. Really? Is that even a thought on the distant horizon of startup founders? Haha.
There's so little competition in the payments space, and this acquisition means that there's even less. I know LemonSqueezy already relied on Stripe, but before the acquisition, there was still a potential path for them to break that dependency.
I tried out LemonSqueezy a bit last year and had a mediocre experience, but it was at least nice to see a payment provider focused on simple, straightforward use cases. Stripe and Paddle have so many different customers and flows that it's hard to use them for simple, standard things. I was hoping to see LemonSqueezy fill that niche, but now Stripe is folding LemonSqueezy into the rest of their complex systems.
When did this happen?
Now if only we could somehow get MoR for marketplaces...
For one thing we have the Making Tax Digital VAT reporting rules as soon as we cross our domestic VAT registration threshold (which is lower than £100k of annualised revenue within the scope of UK VAT so something a high growth startup is going to want to cross pretty quickly). To comply with those rules we need a 100% automated system for transferring VAT records from any services we use to collect payments into our MTD-compliant VAT reporting software. I'm still waiting for anyone to show me an easy and cost-effective way to do that properly with any non-MoR payment service provider. AFAIK none of the PSPs I've ever used has any documentation on how to do this, nor do any of the VAT reporting systems I've used since MTD came in. I'm not sure all of the approved reporting systems have the kind of API available that you'd need to implement this kind of data transfer even with significant programming/integration effort.
And that's only the easy case of domestic collection and reporting. Internationally there are several services that will accurately calculate the required tax for you based on whatever rules apply wherever your customer is and whatever they are buying (you hope) but again that's only the relatively easy part. You also need to handle all the registration, tax reporting, possibly specific customer invoicing requirements, and tax remittance obligations everywhere they might apply. Obviously that's completely impractical for any SME that isn't a tax specialist because no business at that scale has lawyers and accountants in every relevant part of the world to advise them and manage those relationships with the local tax authorities. In sensible places there are again thresholds for local sales where you don't have to do anything about tax until you're also doing a significant amount of business there that isn't going to happen overnight but who wants to try to work out everywhere in the world that isn't sensible like that?
Merchants of record usually charge pretty hefty fees compared to vanilla payment service providers but they're essentially a combination of automating a lot of pain and an insurance policy. Apparently the global tax system is now sufficiently opaque and risky that the market estimates the compliance overhead to be around 6-7% of all relevant trade worldwide.
I would love to use only Stripe, but MoR provides for me more than calculating how much tax I need to report per country. It takes a couple of days per month to prepare documents for my country's fiscal authority to report VAT and other taxes from customers inside and outside the EU. This is because in case of MoR I only have a couple of invoices per month but from a single company (the MoR) that is from one country. So there is little reporting done.
MoR for marketplaces basically means merchant of record for Stripe Connect and you, as the platform, take the tax liability via the MoR functionality automatically for your sellers (connected accounts), right?
Mind sending me an email at kevinpeters at stripe dot com? Would love to hear about the use case.
And probably just a great compliant to their TaxJar acquisition from 2021 (+ entry into Paddles space).
He also happens to have found ways to profit from that.
He played a big role in early NextJS development and did great work. My comment was meant as a remark on his public persona, he is very willing to over promise and embelish on how something actually works.
How much are they worth now? I can only imagine their valuation has dropped. Does anyone use Vercel beyond free / low plans?
Vercel is worth exactly what the last person paid for it. There's no real way to come up with another valuation until there's another liquidity event.
Another way to look at it, the last round of investors are valuing in-predictions for future value and have access to potentially private information and financials. From the outside it's not really possible to come up with a valuation to compare to there's, we'd be working with a totally different set of data.
That sounds somewhat promising but not entirely committed.
I hope not, this time, but if I were a betting man…
I don't sticking with a product you've been working on for only 3 years is a big priority
What’s the barrier to entry for starting up a similar business?
One thing which is weird about tax is physical presences in some cases. In some countries, you actually might need a representative to file your taxes. Plus you need to learn how to register in those countries and how to file taxes.
There are probably more things that you need to look up, but that’s what I remember.
What's the barrier to entry for starting up a similar business?
The merchant of record model.
Smart founders will be looking carefully and observing how Stripe fails to retain clientele and think about creating something that fits the Lemon Squeezy gap in the market.
99% of SaaS won't reach the MRR needed to justify MoR
Of the 1% those breaking through 7 digit MRR can simply hire in house to manage tax remittance and not confuse their customers with invoices labelled with MoR's branding
All in all this seems like the fear campaign has worked beautifully for Paddle and Lemonsqueezy but some of us saw right through it and never really felt the need to pay 5%~11% (!!)
Looks like Stripe will shut down MoRs one by one
Didn’t care about my supposed tax liability in Saudi Arabia. I think I owe those guys $7. Come and get it.
Or in Serbia. Or the EU, more broadly. Or in the province of Saskatchewan. All of which I theoretically owe sales tax.
I’m registered for GST in Australia. I live in Australia. I will slavishly follow Australian law and submit my GST on time.
The rest of it? For a one-person business? Utterly unfeasible.
As someone who wants to do the right thing but would also like their business to actually do something useful and not spend 95% of its time doing admin work this is the kind of thing that stops me sleeping well at night. It's also why I've become something of an advocate of MoRs and a critic of basically all other traditional payment service providers. I fear the reckoning is a matter of when and not if and so passing the buck to an organisation that actually has a fighting chance of complying may be the only reasonable survival strategy. Of course then I lie awake worrying about the lack of competition in the MoR space - not helped by today's announcement in all honesty - and the dangers of being so heavily integrated with a specific third party service that can't easily be replaced and yet is critical to the sales process. What a time to be running a business in a world where this kind of international sales should be thriving.
Until now, please, friend, this isn’t something you need to lose sleep over. Assuming I’m not talking to the CEO of Unilever.
but the reality is if you dont have 1M ARR from EU there really isn't enough on the table to matter. So you owe 1k in Hungary or UAE, they are not getting INTERPOL to bust down your door especially if you dont live in EU or have legal entity in EU.
It's amazing how rampant crowd thinking is among software engineers and its exploited constantly by a gaslighting crowd who show up to spread the fears until it becomes just accepted as a real risk.
It's true that realistically SMEs have a degree of shielding from the consequences because there are plenty of large enterprises to go after first and they have bigger wallets for the tax man and his limited resources to chase.
But those enterprises also have armies of lawyers and accountants to defend themselves and the scale to treat any lost decisions and resulting penalties as just a cost of doing business. To a small business the cost of responding to a formal audit by the tax man alone can be a major expense and have a deep and long-lasting personal impact on the people running the business. Ask anyone in the UK who's been the wrong side of an IR35 investigation - even one they "won" after several years of fighting with HMRC.
As I said before - the trouble with the ostrich argument is that it works until it doesn't. The argument people are making against mine here is essentially that it's OK not to do your taxes if you can get away with it. If software engineers are excessively risk averse in this then maybe entrepreneurs are excessively risk tolerant. We probably never hear about the acquisition that never happened because of something that showed up in due diligence or the startup that never got that far because it did get bogged down in red tape when something went wrong and never recovered.
The real point here is that it's crazy that anyone even has to have this discussion. Governments should get their acts together and reach agreements where international trade below some reasonable de minimis threshold doesn't incur any international compliance or tax obligations at all and only businesses big enough to be turning over significant amounts of money in a particular area need to do anything special. There should be no need for merchant of record services to exist - at least not from the point of view of ensuring tax compliance for small businesses.
For clarity, this is not the argument that I am making.
My argument is that it is obviously impossible for me, a solopreneur, to meet my global tax ‘obligations’.
As in, literally impossible. It’s not that I’m just choosing not to. It would be impossible for me to run a business while registering for and remitting tax to all of the global authorities who, since I sold a $20 PDF to someone in their country, believe that I owe them taxes.
And so if that’s against the law, well so be it. Let them come. There’s nothing I can do short of shutting down my business.
Because whose law, by the way? Serbia’s tax law? I’ll tell you now, sitting in my kitchen in Australia, Serbia’s tax law is not high on the list of things that I fear.
In case of invoices from EU as I am living in an EU country and the business is registered in an EU country I have to take into account collecting or not VAT and what percentage of VAT needs to be collected. There is OSS VAT and some other facilities, but all this takes days per month from my time to handle. And I prefer to spend those days coding something.
Moreso if they are inside EU there is a mechanism to cross-check if the other side reported the invoice (either sent or received) so to be compliant if you sell to multiple countries you have to report invoices.
The same goes for selling to US specially in case of ebooks - there are treaties in place that define royalty percent when the final customer is an US citizen.
So maybe if you are small and have the business registered in EU, the fiscal authorities will not come for you, but if they come the penalty is big enough to get me out of business. Thus I use MoR where for the income I get one or two invoices per month from LS and that is the only thing to report. Better as they are registered in US the reporting is simpler :)
if you make close to or more than this from EU countries you can afford to hire
> Lemon Squeezy has been processing payments on Stripe since our inception.
They're not your competition if you are already their most important supplier.