The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4) • Hacker News Board

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#61

Post by thibaut_barrere » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 7:52 PM UTC

vfdfv wrote: post #40

stevoski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I consider using Stripe a "do-it-yourself" solution, which requires manual coding. As far as handling EU VAT, Stripe offers nothing, and you need to manually implement this. I meant that you should use a service last FastSpring or Avangate initially, which require no coding, and completely take care of VAT.

Do you know if Braintree handles EU VAT in an automatic way? I've read the article below but I'm not totally sure what to make of it: https://www.taxamo.com/braintree-announce-partnership-taxamo... I am definitely not interested in hand-coding a solution.

I don't know about Braintree, but I can report that for my SaaS app (https://www.wisecashhq.com, currently priced in $ but France-based), I used Recurly (https://www.recurly.com) which handles EU VAT very nicely (including VAT changes happening in 2015).

I use them together with Stripe as my gateway, it generates proper invoices and applies the rate of the buyer's country unless a valid VAT number has been provided. They also provide a stripe-like js library so that the credit-card number doesn't go through my server.

With regard to VAT MOSS report, they do most of the checks, I only wrote a little ETL script using http://www.kiba-etl.org/ to create a break-down of the related amounts for each quarter and each country, which I then submit manually to the VAT MOSS French website.

So in my case, this is fully automated, and I'm pretty happy with this :-)

Feel free to email me if you have questions.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#62

Post by thibaut_barrere » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #12

jpallen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The VATMOSS rules mean that you need to collect, verify and store a bunch more info than previously: You need to be able to show evidence for the country the buyer is in, and check that ip address, address, credit card, etc match. It sounds like the cost came from the software development required to put the infrastructure in place to adhere to this and so wasn't something an advisor could help with. With it being a…

Stupid question: is there a service which you can hand off the evidence-gathering to? Seems like a very good opportunity.

Recurly does this (see my other comment in the same thread).

Full doc: https://docs.recurly.com/eu-vat-2015#when_to_tax_require_two...

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#63

Post by archagon » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

Reading this stuff makes me glad my side projects are all native apps sold through app stores. No servers, no payment processing, little upkeep; once you're done, you're done.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#64

Post by pjlegato » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

finnn wrote: post #53

thesis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely definitely definitely use something like Minfraud from Maxmind. The cost is negligible. We set the score we block transactions at rather low, and manually approve anything over that. It's super cheap and has saved us tons of money and headaches!

Seems like this should be on the credit card processor to deal with?

Unfortunately for merchants, no, the legal responsibility for fraudulent transactions rests entirely with the merchant.

Not only that, but processors routinely penalize merchants who fail to screen fraudulent transactions sufficiently with fines and eventually banishment from the processor.

A few processors might provide something like this as a paid value-added service, but it's unusual. The next-gen all-in-one card processors would make a lot of money if they offered this.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#65

Post by pjlegato » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #34

ffn wrote: post #11

Okay, say you're a US citizen building some digi service like JS Bin, and VATMOSS starts fling threats at you, for how long can you go about ignoring them? I mean 3.5k GBP and however many weekdays it took isn't exactly affordable for every small business, and if you don't even have many Euro pro-users, I don't see the cost-benefit justification of giving VATMOSS priority unless they can reach across the Atlantic.

VATMOSS is a nightmare for small businesses. I am lucky that authorities in my country decide that I can avoid it with my project (because it doesn't fit exact definition of electronic service so I can pay VAT in my country as it's a place the service is provided in according one interpretation of the new law) but they have plans to extend it and I may be forced to go through accounting hell to comply with this regul…

> I guess they think typical business is like Google or Amazon or something.

Exactly. Many in the EU imagine that "business owner" is a synonym for "evil capitalist plutocrat." For them, if you are not someone's employee, you are by definition rich. Questions of scale are ignored.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#66

Post by Taxamo » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

vfdfv wrote: post #40

stevoski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I consider using Stripe a "do-it-yourself" solution, which requires manual coding. As far as handling EU VAT, Stripe offers nothing, and you need to manually implement this. I meant that you should use a service last FastSpring or Avangate initially, which require no coding, and completely take care of VAT.

Do you know if Braintree handles EU VAT in an automatic way? I've read the article below but I'm not totally sure what to make of it: https://www.taxamo.com/braintree-announce-partnership-taxamo... I am definitely not interested in hand-coding a solution.

Hey, this should help: http://support.taxamo.com/customer/portal/articles/1781966-h... and more detail here: https://www.taxamo.com/doc/payment_providers/braintree/

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#67

Post by StillBored » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

umziehennachbar wrote: post #42

If $6 is too cheap and encourages fraudsters to test credit cards on your service because banks don't get concerned about transactions at that cost, how much should he have charged at a minimum? $10 $20?

I wondered that myself, especially since it doesn't have to be more expensive to the end user. Instead of selling them 1 month for $6, sell them 12 for $72 or some such, or make them buy a minimum of 10 accounts to get a monthly rate.

Yah, I know the trend is to do a bunch of little micro payments, but its not like you can't do the math for them an say "$6 a month" then when they go to order it, limit the minimum number of months in order to increase the total.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#68

Post by saidajigumi » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:14 PM UTC

> I can't win the complaint. The card was stolen, the £6 belongs to the original card owner, no question.

This is so wrong. Business owners, on average, have little to no information or power to deal with this. The only agencies that have ultimate ability to deal with fraud are the card issuers and banks. IIRC, it was Bruce Schneier who first clearly articulated this for me. By placing all fraud risk on the issuers, they're fully incentivized to fix the problem as well as possible.

But instead when small (or even large) business customers are subjected to ridiculous fraud charges as described in Remy's article, fraud is transformed into a kind of externalized cost imposed by these same issuers.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#69

Post by spb » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:17 PM UTC

Vexs wrote: post #58

daxelrod wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US customer, I'm hesitant to use 3D Secure because: 1) The implementations by Visa and MasterCard have security weaknesses, terrible usability and look like phishing: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/fc10vbvsecurecode.pdf 2) My understanding is that my bank shifts liability to me for 3D Secure transactions. Why would I want extra liability?

"with one (UK-government-owned) bank, two wrong password attempts simply lead to an invitation to set a new password." Good lord! Reading through this document is like reading a primer in how not to make a secure form.

Wait, what? Like, [Microsoft Bob][1] style?

[1]: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/TheChannel9Team/Ben-Armstron...

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#70

Post by chejazi » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:21 PM UTC

JS Bin is a service that appeals to techies. As such, it should see moderate success accepting Bitcoin! Bitcoin transactions are non-reversible, which would solve the fraud complications.