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Stripe Tax

stripe.com

71–80 of 383 posts

Re: Stripe Tax

#71
post #56

That looks great, but that's a ridiculous pricing scheme. If you invoice $100k in a year, you're paying $4000 to Stripe to manage your sales tax. A lot of the issues with sales tax are not knowing your regulatory requirements and set up. I'd say that's probably worth $4k, but then going forward you still have to pay them that amount. I'd say it would be more worthwhile to pay an accountant to do that for you, and sav…

Nope, if you have $100k transactions in a year, it will be $100,000 * 0.005 = $500 not $4,000 (And 0.4% is when you make more than $50,000 in a month)

I too made the mistake of doing amount*0.05 when they provided me the pricing in beta.

This is why I went with them, if I can't do a simple percentage computation I'd rather not do the taxes myself.

And if you're making $1M a year, it will then be $4,000. And I guess that's still cheaper than having your accountant going through all your Stripe documents, computing taxes while also, on your side, having to make sure you're 100% tax compliant. Maybe at $10,000,000 it will start being a bit pricey, but at that point you'll most probably discuss with Stripe to reduce that fee.

Re: Stripe Tax

#72

Stripe makes such complex products appear so simple. Their product pages are art of work. Amazing company.

Like, every single time. Their execution is amazing. Serious question, have any of their products had a poor rollout? I’m not asking about a feature you’d prefer that’s missing. I’m asking about something being buggy, poorly documented, or having a confusing marketing page.

The new additional transaction fee for Stripe Billing is awkward. They charge an extra 0.5%, which is fine, but it always comes out as a separate transaction instead of being added on top of their regular transaction fee. Sometimes it gets withdrawn from your balance after they've already deposited your earnings, leading them to make a withdrawal from the bank.

Not a huge deal, and I still love Stripe!

Re: Stripe Tax

#73

Very happy to see this, it is such a necessary feature. I was recently looking for an option to enable VAT calculation in Stripe and couldn't believe it wasn't there. Now it is, and it looks very well done as Stripe's features usually are. But 0.5% fee per transaction is.. steep.

Thanks for the feedback! Completely understand your reaction to pricing. For a bit of context, we’ve spent the past year listening to users and trying to understand the best way to price. In finalizing our launch pricing, we made sure there are no fixed upfront costs or contracts, nor are there any per transaction fixed fees either. We tried to find a price point that ultimately was not prohibitive for small business…

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Re: Stripe Tax

#74

Ben Evans once described Stripe as tax on Internet SaaS. For a moment I’d thought it was Stripe admitting the same.

The same "tax" existed before Stripe, and it was higher, in both overall costs and development complexity.

Re: Stripe Tax

#75
post #51

I have a nano sized business to cover some server costs in Finland. Here are the EU rules as I understand them: * Selling goods - If selling to private persons in European Union fiscal territory (EUFT), add 24% (Finnish VAT). - If selling to businesses in EUFT, no VAT. - If selling to anyone outside EUFT, no VAT, but you may be liable to collect and pay VAT to the customer's country's tax authorities. - Note that the…

There are also a lot of thresholds that might apply to your situation. More rules to look up, but could simplify it to having less administration if your revenue is under a couple K's

Re: Stripe Tax

#77
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the 0.5% adds up. 0.5% for Billing, 2.9% + 30c per transaction, more if you add e.g. fraud for teams etc. Stripe is great and I use it too, but the way they charge you (a percentage of your revenue) is simply not that fair in the long run while their workload has a fixed cost per transaction.

Seems very fair pricing compared to competitors

Why does it have to be a percentage of your revenue? It’s doing exactly the same thing for a $100 invoice and a $10000 invoice, why does the latter cost 100x more?

Re: Stripe Tax

#78

Do they offer a way to set a final price including taxes? In many jurisdictions your advertised price (e.g. for German users on your german page) needs to include taxes.

How does that work when the amount of the tax depends on the location? Do your visitors need to enter their billing & shipping information before they can browse your site?

Either that (see the jetbrains store as a random example) or other indicators such as language, tld-domain, ip origin, advertisement targets etc.

Of course offering one price for everyone is fine as well.

These rules are usually B2C only. For B2B either way is fine.

(I'm definitely no tax expert. Do you own research if needed;) )

Re: Stripe Tax

#79
We started using Stripe recently for a worldwide base of customers and I was a bit flabbergasted that Stripe didn't have a tax solution already built in.

Taxes are a PITA, and in my opinion this product from stripe makes enormous sense. If it's as good as everything else they do, it'll simply our lives enormously. Super happy to see this being released.

Re: Stripe Tax

#80

This is great! ATM I'm banning all EU end users from purchasing my SaaS unless they're a business because the cost of handling VATMOSS is just not worth it. It also definitely played a role in choosing to do a B2B service over a B2C one. So now the choice is: - File VAT yourself, pay 3.5% + some pennies to Stripe - Pay 5% to Paddle and they file VAT for you Definitely glad to see more competition in this area.

Actually, Stripe's payment fees are lower for European merchants (because card interchange is lower) so it would be more like 1.9% plus some pennies.

https://stripe.com/en-de/pricing

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