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

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

#151

Post by maze-le »

wobbleblob wrote: post #148
PythonicAlpha wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think, that so many (at least educated) people in the EU believe that ... but the problem is (and I saw evidence for that again and again), that the politicians like to talk about the "Founder culture" or that they want to aid smaller businesses ... but in fact, they do the absolute opposite. I see that, because at least in Germany (where it is very chic in the political class to talk how to aid smaller busin…

I know two people who tried to start a business in Germany and failed, not because of the EU but because of domestic, German rules. One tried to start some kind of innovative form of pharmacy (the details weren't clear to me), but found himself unable to join the pharmacy guild, and apparently it is illegal to start a business without joining the guild. The other tried to start a bed & breakfast business, but the 'br…

In germany there is a saying: "If you work independently, you are always with one foot in jail". It is not unreasonable either, because I know of accountants and laywers (ie: people who do this all the time) who sometimes get lost in the jungle of regulations and decrees (European, National, Subnational, Communal, Branch of work, Union/Worker-regulations etc.). It is also no uncommon for some regulations, depending on the type of work, to be mutually exclusive.

I live in germany and I am willing to be independent in the mid-term (~ 2-4 years), but I have major doubts about doing it here...

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

#152

Post by djm_ »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #61
vfdfv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 provid…

This is the setup (Recurly + Stripe) the article is complaining about though, it doesn't protect well against fraud.

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

#153

Post by instakill »

vfdfv wrote: post #137
umziehennachbar wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does that mean? Please describe

Give your users something like "first two weeks free", which will annoy the fraudsters who want the charge to go through immediately.

That's quite clever.

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

#154

Post by Asbostos »

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…

Can't you just assume the highest tax rate and pay that on every sale so you don't have to guess the country? Seems like it would save everyone money for a small business like this.

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

#155

Post by Asbostos »

I know PayPal isn't popular but it's by far the easiest way to accept payments online that I've found. You don't have to live in the US,Canada or EU, which is a weakness of all the new services like Stripe and every other startup promising to "fix payments". I set it up for my small business years ago with no coding or worrying about weird tax rules and it just works. I process each payment manually so there's a bit of a delay for the customers but I've never had a chargeback although my prices are a bit higher.

The main drawback is customers think they need a PayPal account and nobody wants to open one - for good reason. The payment page has a dark pattern that makes it look like you have to sign up to pay by credit card.

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

#156

Post by kalleboo »

acdha wrote: post #127
derefr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa and co. are big—really big—so I've never understood why they've not just leaned on the OS manufacturers and browser makers to provide them some form of unique, unforgeable signal to users that they're interacting with a real bank. There could be, say, an HTML5-exposed API capable of triggering "super-modal" forms (like OS UAC does) if-and-only-if the page is being served from a secure origin cross-signed by some…

The better way to do this would be some sort of two-factor thing – e.g. imagine if the physical card had the equivalent of an embedded RSA-style one-time code generator or, better, a U2F USB/NFC device – which would be resistant to UI spoofing or, in the U2F case, phishing. Unfortunately the banks have less motivation to invest in this as long as the costs of fraud are pushed onto merchants and all of the major playe…

One of my Swedish banks uses a chip-and-pin reader for 3DSecure. You insert your card, authenticate with your PIN, and then sign a nonce to validate your transaction. https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3237/2486214902_8feafd8200_b....

Another one uses a smartphone 2FA app.

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

#157

Post by wobbleblob »

maze-le wrote: post #151
wobbleblob wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know two people who tried to start a business in Germany and failed, not because of the EU but because of domestic, German rules. One tried to start some kind of innovative form of pharmacy (the details weren't clear to me), but found himself unable to join the pharmacy guild, and apparently it is illegal to start a business without joining the guild. The other tried to start a bed & breakfast business, but the 'br…

In germany there is a saying: "If you work independently, you are always with one foot in jail". It is not unreasonable either, because I know of accountants and laywers (ie: people who do this all the time) who sometimes get lost in the jungle of regulations and decrees (European, National, Subnational, Communal, Branch of work, Union/Worker-regulations etc.). It is also no uncommon for some regulations, depending o…

Look across your north western border. Many people, especially in the tech and creative industries, work as freelancers there. As long as you have no employees other than yourself, it is made very easy.

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

#158

Post by samuellb »

bluecalm wrote: post #39
stevoski wrote: post #19

Please, please, anyone, if you are getting started in online payment processing, don't do it yourself. Use a service that already handles the VAT and fraud detection issues. Then, when you've proven your product, and got substantial sales, you can write your own. Maybe. The author of the article spent weeks and thousands of euros to implement a payment system. And yet he had only a handful of customers.

Not much choice here (Poland). You can use payment gateway (say PayPal) but no luck with VAT and ridiculous VATMOSS regulations like being required to keep 2 pieces of evidence of customer location (say address and IP) which for example PayPal doesn't give you access to (you only go the address).

I use PayPal for donations to an F/OSS project (which are subject to VAT in my country). This is how I "solved" the VATMOSS problem:

1. Generate different PayPal buttons for different countries (depending on IP). The country of the IP is included in the receipt. Currently I only have Sweden and "other".

2. For other countries, I'll manually ask the user to confirm the transaction (the intention is to make it count as a manual transaction, so I can simply use 25% VAT of my country). If the user doesn't respond I'll have to issue a refund.

Foreign users are _very_ uncommon in my case, so it works for me (my software is specific to my country anyway). I'm not even VATMOSS registered, only VAT registered.

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

#159

Post by maze-le »

wobbleblob wrote: post #157
maze-le wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In germany there is a saying: "If you work independently, you are always with one foot in jail". It is not unreasonable either, because I know of accountants and laywers (ie: people who do this all the time) who sometimes get lost in the jungle of regulations and decrees (European, National, Subnational, Communal, Branch of work, Union/Worker-regulations etc.). It is also no uncommon for some regulations, depending o…

Look across your north western border. Many people, especially in the tech and creative industries, work as freelancers there. As long as you have no employees other than yourself, it is made very easy.

Thanks, i'll keep that in mind

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

#160

Post by mdpopescu »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #6

I discovered a similar problem with writing, which is that writing an email or a comment takes no time at all, but when someone is paying for what I write it takes a lot more effort . I wrote a column for a couple of years and it wasn't until the second year that I actually took my editors advice to just send her the first version and work on it collaboratively rather than try to get it perfect. I see side projects a…

This reminds me of Heinlein's rule three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
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