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Stripe Tax

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Re: Stripe Tax

#81
post #68
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…

> If you invoice $100k in a year, you're paying $4000 to Stripe to manage your sales tax. The pricing on the page says 0.4% - that's $400/year not $4,000 > Now, if you're making $1 million a year, that's $40k It's $4,000 by the above. > compared to a few thousand you'll pay your accounting firm to do it. It's not _just_ the money you pay the accountant to do it once, you need to get all of the data about where the cu…

Yeah, you're right, my coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

For the amount I thought you would pay for Stripe to do that, you could have hired an accountant to figure all of that out for you on an ongoing basis, but for the actual price that's a pretty good deal to not have to think about it.

My opinion on accounting services has always been that it's nothing that a business owner can't do themselves since it's not really that complicated, but it's never worth the time when you can pay someone who already knows what they're doing. Stripe Tax falls into that category for me too, it's cheap enough that it makes it not worth it to do it yourself.

Re: Stripe Tax

#82

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…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Tax

#83
I was recently looking for a way to sell my digital product.

I was surprised how complicated all these solutions are. First of all, I want a 'merchant of record' to handle my taxes, which basically gets rid of most payment solutions.

Secondly, I want an easy to use affiliate program where I can add affiliates.

Oh man, they almost all work with some complex external affiliate service.

I used to sell my indie game with Plimus (around 2009), which is now BlueSnap, but even they are now really complex and working with external affiliate network.

Ended up with Gumroad, which has all of these things, in a very simple and clear way. Now I understand why they are so popular.

Re: Stripe Tax

#84

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?

Generally there's a dropdown to select your country, often next to or integrated into the language and currency selection

Re: Stripe Tax

#85

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?

VAT is uniform across all of Germany. Therefore detailed location information isn't necessary. The country can be inferred reasonably accurately from the IP. You can have a drop-down somewhere to correct the country if necessary.

~~And I don't think there's a law that requires you to show the price including tax, but it's definitely expected.~~ I have been corrected: it is indeed required.

Re: Stripe Tax

#86

I was recently looking for a way to sell my digital product. I was surprised how complicated all these solutions are. First of all, I want a 'merchant of record' to handle my taxes, which basically gets rid of most payment solutions. Secondly, I want an easy to use affiliate program where I can add affiliates. Oh man, they almost all work with some complex external affiliate service. I used to sell my indie game with…

Agreed. Payhip is another one.

Re: Stripe Tax

#87
This looks great. Implementing Avalara for tax calculation was a large pain across multiple dimensions.

Stripe Tax integrates with TaxJar for automatic US tax filing [1]. I wish TaxJar had clearer pricing [2], as 12 filings a year is tiny.

[1]: https://www.taxjar.com/pricing/ [2]: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/reports

Re: Stripe Tax

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the world of saavy SaaS businesses. Smart/enterprising SaaS founders and businesses these days all know to tie their billing to whatever metric/KPI they are solving for customers -- per-seat billing, per-pageview, etc. Why make a little money (even if it's 2-10x your cost) when you can make much more by taking a small-seeming percentage of every single that comes through your business. When your customer w…

Apparently Buffet calls this a “toll booth” business. Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.

Middlemen all the way down. At this point I think the question is when does the fatigue start? Maybe it never does -- if 10 companies all take 0.5%, you're at 5% but what if you use them to run 90% of the work of running your actual business? For many businesses that would be worth it (and most SaaS-ers and proper business people would heartily agree).

I'm about to go off on a wild tangent here but I think this is the obvious endgame for autonomous vehicles (article from Ars Technical on this hit HN just today[0]). More narrative for that world where no one owns anything and everyone rents forever and if you didn't own capital by 2100 your chance to do so is now infinitesimal. Safety of autonomous cars will surpass human driving, human driving will be outlawed, and the toll booth behavior will kick in with either companies licensing self driving technology, or the cars, or just running the services. Yeah, you never pay the $1-2k to buy a beat up first car (that could have lasted you 5 years with careful care and proper maintenance), but you're stuck on the $8.50/day ($2040/year if you commute to work 240 days/year), forever.

Another wilder tangent (possibly too much of a distraction from the topic at hand) -- this future is one of the reasons I am skeptical of UBI. UBI feels like the fastest way to encourage every kind of company to take this route. If you know every citizen will get $1k/month, the monopoly-dominated markets will fight (initially, at least) to get their share of that guaranteed $1k, almost as a form of governmental graft. Differentiated work pools get rarer and rarer (people specialize up, but automation gets better, ad infinitum), and at some point a large mass of people are getting UBI + gig economy wages. The corporations who have carved their part of the daily budget out never stop winning -- they now don't need to worry about economic conditions for their now-somewhat-more-distant gig worker force, the government will step in to help citizens, and those corporations can continue to influence those proceedings. What breaks this cycle? Is the goal a utopian world where $UBI is actually enough to free people of work completely? That never seems to be the goal, or maybe I just haven't seen enough people play out enough steps in the UBI plan. I just know that when people doing really well in the current capitalism-on-overdrive system start to get behind something that really seems like a utopia for those doing not-so-well in the current system, there's a catch.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/06/volkswagen-plans-to-off...

Re: Stripe Tax

#89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

VAT is uniform across all of Germany. Therefore detailed location information isn't necessary. The country can be inferred reasonably accurately from the IP. You can have a drop-down somewhere to correct the country if necessary. ~~And I don't think there's a law that requires you to show the price including tax, but it's definitely expected.~~ I have been corrected: it is indeed required.

For B2C it is mandated by law[1] §1 (1) and (2)

[1]https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/pangv/BJNR105800985.html

Re: Stripe Tax

#90
So. After 10 years in business and THOUSANDS of customer requests (I even made one myself, in-person when I met Patrick Colison at a conference) Stripe has introduced... a calculator. And you still have to do everything yourself - filing the papers and wiring money.

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with my current payment provider that handles _everything_.

I do admire Stripe and wish I could move some day :(

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