Costs of running a macOS app studio business • Hacker News Board

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#201

Post by pSYoniK » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 6:24 PM UTC

One aspect that shocks me is someone complaining about having a 15.3% tax rate at an income of 84k/year. If your state is incompetent, corrupt and whatever else, its your duty as a citizen to do something about. Barring that, I guess paying less tax than the aprox 1.9 million Romanians getting paid minimum wage (aprox tax paid by a minimum wage employee is about 37%) while making about 3 times the average salary is still not good enough.

I appreciate the writeup and the thoughts on time and money, yet the complaints about taxation for someone making this much money in that country, cannot but ruin it a bit for me.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#202

Post by dr_kiszonka » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 6:32 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #189

laurels-marts wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on. You couldn't find a job at 55 because you were perceived as too old?

Oh, yeah. I hear people in their thirties, complaining about being treated as "old." When the CEO is 26, then it's easy to have a young workforce. In The Days of Yore, the C-suite was generally folks in their fifties, and the youngsters were forced to work with their chronological seniors. The older folks had the money and power, but they needed the creativity and energy of the younger workers. If the workforce is al…

> or need

They do need you, but they don't know it, yet.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#203

Post by gumballindie » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

sebastianz wrote: post #166

hereonout2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just found a newly built 7 bedroom villa with pool in Bucharest for under €500k, not ideal as it's near the airport but if anyone could point to an equivalent in the Manchester metropolitan area I'd be very interested. Also found an entire building on Bucharest's second busiest street Magheru Blvd for €1.4M. Out of my price range unfortunately but it does include 12 separate 3 bedroom apartments, a floor of offices…

> Also found an entire building on Bucharest's second busiest street Magheru Blvd for €1.4M. Out of my price range unfortunately but it does include 12 separate 3 bedroom apartments, a floor of offices, and a restaurant, cafe and art gallery at street level. This sounds extremely dubious and I would not take that into account in any relevant real estate price for central Bucharest :)

Yeah there’s the occasional news piece in the uk showing some random person buying “homes” in Romania or Bulgaria for 5k£. People fail to distinguish fact from fantasy, and imagine outliers are the norm. No mentioning of the properties being better of demolished and rebuilt or in the middle of nowhere. There’s a lot of anti east european propaganda in western europe, likely a remnant of the cold war era. Keeps the consumer types happy and grateful for being born in a “rich” country.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#204

Post by czottmann » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

czottmann wrote: post #60

w0mbat wrote: post #17

The Apple app store is a disaster for making a living as an indie. People can't find the apps so sales are low, market rate prices are also low. The only way to make a living is to rip-off users with misleading subscriptions, which I won't do. I made much more money writing $20 shareware in the 90s. That's why I write apps for a corporation now.

> The only way to make a living is to rip-off users with misleading subscriptions (Personal experience/anecdata follows.) I don't know. I sell a macOS/iOS productivity app on the App Store[1], and while not getting rich there, I can tell you that's actually useful to people, you can put a non-peanuts price tag on it. I love that it's relatively straightforward to get an app out in front of a lot of potential customer…

Apologies for the post-eggnog grammar there.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#205

Post by alin23 » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

jq-r wrote: post #199

Thank you for the article Alin! Writing this from Croatia and whatever you said in your article and here in the comments you can interchange Romania an Croatia without a second thought. Myself, I work for a US company and the taxman takes almost half of what I've earned. I wouldn't paying any or all of the tax if I would actually get anything in return. Public health system is on the verge of collapse so you have to…

Wow, everything sounds terrifyingly similar to Romania. I guess we’ll soon see and participate in some widespread protests in Europe, I don’t see a better way to wake up the officials

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#206

Post by alin23 » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

pSYoniK wrote: post #201

One aspect that shocks me is someone complaining about having a 15.3% tax rate at an income of 84k/year. If your state is incompetent, corrupt and whatever else, its your duty as a citizen to do something about. Barring that, I guess paying less tax than the aprox 1.9 million Romanians getting paid minimum wage (aprox tax paid by a minimum wage employee is about 37%) while making about 3 times the average salary is s…

All I can say is: you’d complain the same if you’d live in this country and be yelled at by every state employee just because you had the audacity to ask them a question, and by every doctor because you got suddenly ill and so on. Only bribe money buys their reluctant cooperation.

Don’t focus on the money, I could be making a million a year and it would still not fix the problem of life insecurity and overall sentiment of hopelessness.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#207

Post by matheusmoreira » Mon, Dec 25, 2023, 11:36 PM UTC

asim wrote: post #22

This is a beautifully poignant post about life and selling one's time. At 39 I've reached this point where I can verbalise that sentiment whereas before I could only really feel it. Having to sell one's time to others sucks. Doing things on someone else's schedule sucks. And ultimately as the post ended, having the freedom to spend life the way it should be spent means sacrificing that extra bit of money we might wan…

My goal in life is to amass enough assets and investments that the monthly return adjusted for inflation equals a good salary that I can live comfortably off of. The ultimate in fuck you money is fuck you monthly cash flow. No doubt it's rent seeking but it's the only rational thing to do in this economic system we all live under.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#208

Post by croemer » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:20 AM UTC

zerr wrote: post #165

croemer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European Economic Area to be precise (i.e. Norway, Switzerland etc abide by the same rules). Yes, if you're not a tiny business (OP isn't tiny) you have to pay VAT to each end customer's country. Though you can declare it in your home country to reduce bureaucracy. VAT law is well developed, what matters is the location of the end customer, not where the seller is, so your technically speaking isn't how it works. Wro…

EEA might demand their citizens to pay the VAT, but how can it demand/enforce this e.g. for some company in Vietnam? What happens when EEAians buy goods in Vietnam with EEA bank's credit cards, e.g. in a not-tiny restaurant? Is the VAT cancelled because they are physically in Vietnam for the time being?

Good question and I had to Google the answer. Until now enforcement was apparently lackluster but EU is tightening up: "As of January 2024, Payment Service Providers (PSPs) have a new role in tackling VAT fraud. They need to report cross border payments to CESOP (the Central Electronic System of Payment Information), a large digital hub. This disclosure is specifically for the purpose of combating tax fraud. It’s focused on business activity, doesn’t record payment reasons, and has strong privacy restrictions." https://www.paddle.com/blog/eu-vat-compliance-for-us-softwar...

This is a good link from the article: https://vat-one-stop-shop.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-07/...

EU VAT law is very well documented, compared to say German income tax law. It's actually fun to understand if one can use such a word here.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#209

Post by croemer » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:29 AM UTC

mathverse wrote: post #176

croemer wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the tax rate is so low, it's no surprise there's no money for education and health care - given that Romania isn't Switzerland. Sure there will be corruption but it can't all go to corruption.

I am puzzled how little people know outside of CEE region. Of course it can. CEE is not high trust society it's been decimated by years of communism and the oligarchy got reinforced with the coming of western european investments. CEE politicians are crooks that believe cattle (the voters) are to be exploited and they cant compete with the developed world anyway. 3m out of 20m of romanians have left the country and t…

I'm sure there is corruption but I don't think it's so black. Where did all the smart Romanian emigrants I know go to school? How come there's 10x more fibre internet than in Germany? Things definitely could be better, but I don't think it's all bad in Romania and all great in say Germany.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#210

Post by croemer » Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 1:38 AM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #196

croemer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like black hat tax accounting. If it's still worth something after 3 years it would be an in-kind payment which will need to be taxed.

> Sounds like black hat tax accounting. If it's still worth something after 3 years it would be an in-kind payment which will need to be taxed. Not really black hat though: it's extremely common. In many countries there are specific rules as to how much you can deduce: say 33.33% yearly and after three years it's considered to have a residual value of zero or 20% yearly and after five years it's considered 0. But the…

There might be special exemptions, but in general what matters for transfer to employees is market value. Legally speaking, see e.g. this Irish documentation (first to show up in my Google search): "You might choose to give your employee an asset which has depreciated in value. Where this occurs the value of the benefit is the market value of the asset on the date of the gift." https://www.revenue.ie/en/employing-people/benefit-in-kind-f... Same thing in Canada and UK, 3 out of 3 countries all do it that way (in general, Canada has up to 500$ exemption): "When gifting capital property to an employee (or anyone else for that matter), the proceeds of disposition for bookkeeping purposes is recorded as zero dollars. This, however, is not how the transaction is treated for tax purposes by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). This is because, the CRA sees the gifting of assets as have being sold for fair market value." https://www.koroll.ca/koroll-and-company-blog/the-tax-implic...