321–330 of 372 posts
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The US tax system is the legislative equivalent of spaghetti code / big ball of mud.
Nah it’s not a US thing; tax codes are the same most everywhere.
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Have you not looked at Stripe? Their product is fairly straight forward to set up
Stripe is fairly straight to set up if you sell products in the US and only accept cards. For selling a SaaS worldwide, Stripe quickly becomes just as much of a nightmare. Taxes, billing, chargebacks, subscriptions, web hooks, different payment methods, VAT validation, card expiries, legislation, changing laws, SCA flows, and my favourite: SCA iframes that become non-responsive on browsers in a certain language. It i…
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I used to work at a company that managed the systems for back of house in fast food chains. We moved customers from excel to an online system. Omg when it came to doing labouring in the US. It’s scary. If a person clocks in at 9:52M. The company only has to pay them from 10am. But in other states they must pay from 9:45am. There’s so much complexity in the us due to all states being different.
It's so much worse than that. Some payroll tax laws vary by SCHOOL DISTRICT of the employee.
It is an interesting challenge though, to create software that is easy to maintain while capturing all these complexities.
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By "temporal model" do you mean relational tables of "customer X used Y amount of this resource at price Z from timestamp A to timestamp B" or ... ?
In field metering situations you can have the timeline of each meter, when it records data points, and then you have the different timeline of the backend service, when it actually _receives_ data points. Bonus points if the meters can send data out of order.
Absolutely agree with the poster. This is my life at the moment. Just to take money for a small piece of software I built. Multiple currencies, trial periods, when in the process do you ask for the creditcard, country specific taxes,... And the worst: invoices. While paddle.com takes care of many of those things - I was shocked after realizing how much work this is going to be. Please think carefully about those thin…
Have also been considering Paddle. Would love to know what you found it's missing?
I'd like to offer a free trial. While they have support for this, a user needs to enter his credit card right at sign up for trials to work.
So in the end I have to build a hybrid solution where my system gets tied to theirs. Still I don't have full control over all e-mails that are sent to the user. I'm not 100% happy, but better than not charging money.
Absolutely agree with the poster. This is my life at the moment. Just to take money for a small piece of software I built. Multiple currencies, trial periods, when in the process do you ask for the creditcard, country specific taxes,... And the worst: invoices. While paddle.com takes care of many of those things - I was shocked after realizing how much work this is going to be. Please think carefully about those thin…
Agreed! But I do prefer to build it for me rather than someone else’s startup, though
Absolutely agree with the poster. This is my life at the moment. Just to take money for a small piece of software I built. Multiple currencies, trial periods, when in the process do you ask for the creditcard, country specific taxes,... And the worst: invoices. While paddle.com takes care of many of those things - I was shocked after realizing how much work this is going to be. Please think carefully about those thin…
Have you looked at Outseta? https://www.outseta.com/billing and https://www.outseta.com/demo . I haven't used it but it looks great. I'd love to hear what you think.
One design decision that, for me, seems to simplify things is to consider the "business system" a type of state machine that records all business events and serves as a "source of truth". If the events are not recorded, they have not occurred from the business perspective. A ledger-type architecture can be useful. This means that business events or user operations generate state transitions, which eventually are impl…
For sure; I do think an event based solution working as a source of truth for the billing is the right solution. However it still creates engineering difficulties (making sure you don't ingest the event twice for instance). The ledger-type architecture can definitely work. When we built the system for a fintech, it was actually an event-based architecture connected to a ledger (taking the money out of a wallet). I th…
Basically everything about enterprise is a nightmare for engineers. What amazes me (after having worked at some of the most profitable companies in the world) is just how little intelligence the leadership has about their own revenue or costs, beyond "wow huge amounts of money is coming in or going out". And how many critical processes are implemented manually, by individuals, with personal spreadsheets, on their lap…