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Comment by corford | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, one of the nice things with using US services that bill in USD (apart from the current exchange rate benefit) is there's no VAT to pay. So, UK retail customers at least, get a 20% discount compared to using home grown offerings.

Personally, I love being able to spin up Linode (and now DO) vms in London but pay USD prices.

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Whether or not VAT is payable is independent of what currency is used to bill in. If you're using a VPS in the UK then there's almost certainly VAT payable by the vendor. If they are in another EU country, and you're VAT registered, and they have your VAT number they can zero-rate the transaction.

They can do that if you're in the same country too.

Yeah, I'm talking for retail customers who don't have a VAT number and can't benefit from the reverse charge scheme.

There is VAT to pay and these companies are required to register for VAT and charge it I believe. Eg see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110202144320/htt...

That doc is dated 2003 so I guess the regs have changed (and there have been some pretty major changes recently like CA2006 and FA2011). I certainly don't get VAT invoices from the US suppliers I use (linode and digital ocean for example).

Edit: The 4th paragraph here seems to settle it: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vatpossmanual/vatposs14300.ht...

The reverse charge mechanism places the burden for accounting for VAT on the recipient if the supplier is outside the UK.

I have a more up-to date reference

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/start/register/when-to-register.h...

I do get them from pingdom, and AWS. I do not get them from Mailchimp or hostgator.

Could be because Pingdom is a Swedish company and AWS is Amazon, which has a presence in Europe?

It may also matter that the service being provided by Digital Ocean is in the UK as well, although I haven't had a chance to read all this yet.

How is there a benefit at the 'current' exchange rate? If the price isn't set in GBP, what have you got to compare against, regardless of the rate right now?

You compare against previous payments...

If you were never in that situation, my experience is in paying less over time as both GBP/EUR have been getting stronger than USD.

Plus, pricing in the home currency is usually larger than the exchange rate (i.e. $10 = £5.83, so pricing would probably be something like $10, £6. Or even more - if not $10/£10 - you know who does that!...)

I'm working on the assumption that if they suddenly started offering services in GBP, they'd price at £5 rather than $5 (like virtually all companies do). Meaning the same service would end up costing £2/month more than it does atm with the current exchange rate.

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