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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

Many people saying here "Pay once, fishy, not trustable". I don't know how much this critic relates to the topic for each commenter (invoicing, being a constantly changing field) but how the general public loathes subscriptions and binding, I actually would double-triple consider any subscription-based software (I'm speaking generally here, not invocing) and would always choose the one-time payment over it.

OP: there could be a better middle ground - you could still offer a one-time payment, and optional subscriptions to newer versions (eg. conformity to newer regulations).

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It should phone the mothership dayly to check legislation changes. You go to work on Monday and when you open the program it shows a nasty messages that explains the change, disable the main button and ask for another $x to enable it again. Users will be angry.

In serious countries, the changes will be anounced in advance, so the author will have to track all of them and may show a warning a few days/weeks before the deadline.

But here in Argentina a few years ago we decided to skip DST one week before the change. I guess the mantainers of all OS still hate us.

pay once for something that is fundamentally tied to regularly recurring costs for the vendor is unsustainable. It's a model that works well for desktop software or something self-hosted where the cost of running (and potentially maintaining) occurs on the buyer side.

Im not going to reach true scale here mate. Even if i create 200.000 invoices a day, the cost will be near 0.

Your cost for running anything on the internet is never near null. The cost for an extra transaction may be, but you'll have a fixed floor.

You'll have servers to run. You'll have servers fail in a weird fashion. You'll have customers that have weird issues. You'll see GDPR requests for data. You'll have servers to patch, software to update. Wait until something comes up where you need legal guidance (ToS and GDPR compliance, for example)

You're doing invoicing for customers - they'll expect that you keep their data safe. They are legally required to keep that data for 10 years. Unless your offer is "Create the invoice from a template and ythe customer is responsbile for safeguarding their data" - in which case I can replace you with an OpenOffice Document Template, for free.

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