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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Can you see a reference to them charging VAT? If not, that's pretty ludicrous.

My first thought was this as well - we tend to list prices inc VAT in Europe, but it's almost always without in the States, no?

America doesn't have a VAT. Internet services seldom have any tax requirement at all. Laws vary, but the onus is on the customer to pay local and state taxes. There is federal sales tax at all.

My buddy that sold books online had to calculate our own state's sales tax (by county and city! yuck) because he has to report here. But if you were out of state he didn't charge the sales tax. Its a broken system, very weird.

Individual states can't tax interstate commerce, that's the job of the feds. Actually, they can if they have a presence in both states - they can only tax a business that has a physical presence in that state. It isn't broken, it is part of the [inferred] Constitution. The idea is to not place burdens on interstate commerce. Without it the states would be free to give their state preference in commerce - to tax commerce interstate at a high rate so nobody wants to engage in interstate commerce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause

"The central rationale for the rule against discrimination is to prohibit state or municipal laws whose object is local economic protectionism, laws that would excite those jealousies and retaliatory measures the Constitution was designed to prevent"

Sure that part is right. Its the part where he had to spend Saturday calculating tax rates for every in-state purchase depending on address. That's broken; it's part of why he gave up the business.

> tend to list prices inc VAT in Europe

I was under the impression it's a legal requirement to show the inc VAT price. (And, show it as the most-prominent price -- no trickery like showing exc VAT bold, and inc VAT in fine print.)

I thought that too and here in Germany I'm very certain that's the case if you are selling to individuals. However when looking at the sales pages of JetBrains[1] (a czech company) they do not include VAT even for the individual developers version (which is explicitly not available to companies) so it might be that only national law applies (EU is difficult ;) )

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/choose_edition.jsp?license...

You can count on the iOS in-app purchase to include VAT. There is no way to bypass that without violating the apple ToS since you'd effectively be charging a different value than you're saying.

If you go through the business sign up flow you can see they are charging 20% VAT.

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