Stripe acquires Lemon Squeezy

And the Hanseatic League before that.

MoR has become a definitive advantage at least here in the UK - to the point where I'm not sure any other arrangement currently makes sense for the kind of tech startups we often discuss here on HN.

For one thing we have the Making Tax Digital VAT reporting rules as soon as we cross our domestic VAT registration threshold (which is lower than £100k of annualised revenue within the scope of UK VAT so something a high growth startup is going to want to cross pretty quickly). To comply with those rules we need a 100% automated system for transferring VAT records from any services we use to collect payments into our MTD-compliant VAT reporting software. I'm still waiting for anyone to show me an easy and cost-effective way to do that properly with any non-MoR payment service provider. AFAIK none of the PSPs I've ever used has any documentation on how to do this, nor do any of the VAT reporting systems I've used since MTD came in. I'm not sure all of the approved reporting systems have the kind of API available that you'd need to implement this kind of data transfer even with significant programming/integration effort.

And that's only the easy case of domestic collection and reporting. Internationally there are several services that will accurately calculate the required tax for you based on whatever rules apply wherever your customer is and whatever they are buying (you hope) but again that's only the relatively easy part. You also need to handle all the registration, tax reporting, possibly specific customer invoicing requirements, and tax remittance obligations everywhere they might apply. Obviously that's completely impractical for any SME that isn't a tax specialist because no business at that scale has lawyers and accountants in every relevant part of the world to advise them and manage those relationships with the local tax authorities. In sensible places there are again thresholds for local sales where you don't have to do anything about tax until you're also doing a significant amount of business there that isn't going to happen overnight but who wants to try to work out everywhere in the world that isn't sensible like that?

Merchants of record usually charge pretty hefty fees compared to vanilla payment service providers but they're essentially a combination of automating a lot of pain and an insurance policy. Apparently the global tax system is now sufficiently opaque and risky that the market estimates the compliance overhead to be around 6-7% of all relevant trade worldwide.

The problem with the ostrich argument is always that it works until it doesn't. Governments have talked about more international cooperation on tax reporting and collection forever. One of these days they're going to start including serious measures for these things as a routine part of trade deals or other big agreements. They have increasingly easy targets as so many online sales now go through a relatively small number of payment systems like Paypal and Stripe that are distributed enough that they could effectively be compelled to cooperate with any new reporting obligations. Then it's going to be a case of small businesses selling internationally commit an average of N offences per day somewhere in the world because it's impractical not to so if you're the unlucky one they decide to make an example out of then that's going to really spoil your day.

As someone who wants to do the right thing but would also like their business to actually do something useful and not spend 95% of its time doing admin work this is the kind of thing that stops me sleeping well at night. It's also why I've become something of an advocate of MoRs and a critic of basically all other traditional payment service providers. I fear the reckoning is a matter of when and not if and so passing the buck to an organisation that actually has a fighting chance of complying may be the only reasonable survival strategy. Of course then I lie awake worrying about the lack of competition in the MoR space - not helped by today's announcement in all honesty - and the dangers of being so heavily integrated with a specific third party service that can't easily be replaced and yet is critical to the sales process. What a time to be running a business in a world where this kind of international sales should be thriving.

Valuing a VC backed company like Vercel really is a bit of a crap shoot. Even major, publicly held companies aren't valued based on things like annual revenue, profits, or anything that shows up on a P&L.

Vercel is worth exactly what the last person paid for it. There's no real way to come up with another valuation until there's another liquidity event.

Another way to look at it, the last round of investors are valuing in-predictions for future value and have access to potentially private information and financials. From the outside it's not really possible to come up with a valuation to compare to there's, we'd be working with a totally different set of data.

Instead you should advocate for payment network neutrality. Visa and MasterCard should be required by US law not to discriminate against transactions, and enforcement should move from the private sector to, well, law enforcement. Like with ACH/FedNow. That might actually get us somewhere productive.