5 ms·

It's not trivial for a side-project to start accept payments. You may need to register a company, open bank account, find and set up a payment processor, publis

by cuu508 5y ago

It's not trivial for a side-project to start accept payments. You may need to register a company, open bank account, find and set up a payment processor, publish a privacy policy, hire an accountant to handle tax reporting, write code, etc. All doable, but not a "let's push this lever and see if money starts flowing" type of deal. And it's not a sure thing the money will start to flow. It will definitely not be 250K 1 dollar a month. 99% of users will just go "fine, I'll switch to one of the other 9 still free alternatives".

makeitdouble 5y ago
I wonder how it would fare if a service followed the Amazon wishlist kind of deal, and have random unrelated users directly pay some amount to the service provider, bypassing the site owner. For instance Linode would expose 30 purchasable items for a site, and each item purchased by a user would pay for 1 day of uptime. As a tradeoff, money going to the project maintainer would need to go through Patreon if they set one up.
christophilus 5y ago
Stripe can take care of most of the hassle. I’d at least send a “Save the service” email with a Stripe payment link (no programming required) and see if I can get some decent bites.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Stripe basically deals with the easiest parts (the technical) and leaves the hardest (or rather, the most energy draining) part for you as a customer/business owner (the bureaucracy of having a business in your country of choice). If you start accepting money, you need to pay taxes, no way around that.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    basically if you start it up now with an email - service going away unless getting paid 1 per month, or one per 3 months even depending on how people feel it worth their time, figure out if it will be worth it, set up stripe, and then you have about a year to do accountant setup business. I mean I am in Denmark and it isn't that difficult, and believe me Denmark is more difficult and entrepreneur unfriendly than most Western countries.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estônia, for example. One-stop-shop accountants will charge you 50-100 euros/mo and take care of everything. They don't tax revenue, just distributed profits. As long as you keep the money in the business (even investing) or take a salary, you won't pay taxes in Estonia (assuming you don't live there).
    - hobo_mark 5y ago
      > Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estonia, for example. But not with Stripe, which always gives you a Delaware C corp as far as I understand. And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency". Edit: oh nevermind https://support.stripe.com/questions/supporting-companies-that-registered-in-estonia-through-e-residency https://support.stripe.com/questions/supporting-companies-th... (anyhow, Estonia borders Russia, invest at your own peril)
      - recuter 5y ago
        > And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency". That would be Xolo.io - but you really don't need a Stripe equivalent in Estonia or most places to incorporate. Registering a company is not that hard most places. I wouldn't recommend Estonia because you still need to open a business bank account for your new entity, that's the hard part. You don't need a C corp for a project like OP. He would want a bog standard LLC which is fiscally transparent for U.S. tax purposes. It gets more conveluted if he himself is not from the US as it would be treated differently by different countries. But it isn't hard, it is just boring to get going.
      - rmbyrro 5y ago
        I've been to Estonia twice. It's a great country with great people. I can assure you 99.8% of Estonians have negative interest in having ties to Putin's Russia. Putin is a thug - pardon the harsh opinion -, he wants to loot Ukraine riches. Estonia is a member of NATO and offers nothing for looting, as they have close to zero natural resources.
  - laurent123456 5y ago
    Initially he could declare this as personal income, just like people who accept donations on open source projects. Once he gets many subscriptions, he can start looking at setting up a company.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Leaving aside whether you're likely to bring in any material amount of money, the logistics involved aren't that hard. You set up whatever payment processor you want, track whatever money comes in (paid to a doing business as entity if you like or just you personally), track business expenses (including computers etc. somewhat related to your business), and file any net income as part of your taxes.
eb0la 5y ago
Hmmm.. Is there a market for that?
- nickjj 5y ago
  > Hmmm.. Is there a market for that? I don't think it's as bad as the parent comment makes it out to be to accept payments. You don't need to register a company, you can act as a sole proprietor. This requires no paper work, fees or filing anything. You would need a bank account but most folks already have one, your personal checking account would work. You can grab and tweak a pre-made privacy policy in less than an hour if you decide to include one. I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes. Of course you need to still pay taxes in April, but you can deal with that then. Even if that wasn't true, the worst case scenario is you pay a fee for not filing every quarter. If you accepted payments and were making tons of money hiring an accountant wouldn't be an issue and if you were making close to nothing then you wouldn't have any fees since you have to be taxed $1,000 in the year to be on the hook for paying estimated taxes per quarter. The last point of writing code stands true tho. You would need to implement some type of payment accepting feature into your app. Fortunately accepting monthly or annual payments is fairly generic. Once you've implemented this in any app you can mostly drop it into another app without a huge amount of effort. It would mainly come down to little tweaks and making the UI match your app.
  - tpetry 5y ago
    Don‘t forget that hn has international users. The rules you describe don‘t have to be the same for everyone. And there are a lot of countries with much bureaucracy.
  - simmons 5y ago
    > I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes. I'm only chiming in here since I've become somewhat of a reluctant expert on estimated taxes over the years (assuming we're talking about the U.S. here; apologies to those outside the U.S.). And it happens to be fresh on my mind, since I tackled my Q1 taxes yesterday. ;) I've never heard anything about an exception for one's first self-employed year, so be careful with this. (But hey, the tax code is huge and complex, so I may just not know about it.) Although if you also have withholding from a W-2 job, it may cover you. Generally, everyone is supposed to pay a certain amount of estimated taxes throughout the year, self-employed or not. But for most people this will happen automatically through W-2 withholding. I suppose it could be a rational move to not worry about estimated taxes the first year, focus on your business instead, and eat any penalties/interest. (You wouldn't be the first to do this.) Or you could just make a guess on what you might owe, and send some money in advance of each estimated tax deadline. If you underestimate, I suppose the penalties/interest would be a lot less than if you avoided it altogether. If you overestimate, you get a refund (or if you choose, a carry-forward to the following year). Or you can do what I did 15 years ago, and spend a weekend studying IRS documents to understand how it all works, set up spreadsheets to calculate estimated taxes using the annualized method, and perform some minimal maintenance on it each year thereafter.
panick21_ 5y ago
Can you not just send e-mail with your IBAN asking for donations? If its so much money that it seriously impacts your taxes that seems like a great thing. At least that wouldn't be a big deal unless you get some serious cash. If you have the email of 250k users who all don't want to deal switching service. I can imagine getting a fair amount with a once a year ask for donations. Like more then making it a paid service, people usually are happy to give some money for things they use for free if its useful.
- asvitkine 5y ago
  The op literally said "(the money I could afford, but it's the time that is more valuable)".
criddell 5y ago
> You many need to register a company Shouldn't you do that anyway to protect yourself?

by cuu508 5y ago

makeitdouble 5y ago

I wonder how it would fare if a service followed the Amazon wishlist kind of deal, and have random unrelated users directly pay some amount to the service provider, bypassing the site owner. For instance Linode would expose 30 purchasable items for a site, and each item purchased by a user would pay for 1 day of uptime. As a tradeoff, money going to the project maintainer would need to go through Patreon if they set one up.

christophilus 5y ago

Stripe can take care of most of the hassle. I’d at least send a “Save the service” email with a Stripe payment link (no programming required) and see if I can get some decent bites.

capableweb 5y ago
Stripe basically deals with the easiest parts (the technical) and leaves the hardest (or rather, the most energy draining) part for you as a customer/business owner (the bureaucracy of having a business in your country of choice). If you start accepting money, you need to pay taxes, no way around that.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  basically if you start it up now with an email - service going away unless getting paid 1 per month, or one per 3 months even depending on how people feel it worth their time, figure out if it will be worth it, set up stripe, and then you have about a year to do accountant setup business. I mean I am in Denmark and it isn't that difficult, and believe me Denmark is more difficult and entrepreneur unfriendly than most Western countries.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estônia, for example. One-stop-shop accountants will charge you 50-100 euros/mo and take care of everything. They don't tax revenue, just distributed profits. As long as you keep the money in the business (even investing) or take a salary, you won't pay taxes in Estonia (assuming you don't live there).
  - hobo_mark 5y ago
    > Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estonia, for example. But not with Stripe, which always gives you a Delaware C corp as far as I understand. And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency". Edit: oh nevermind https://support.stripe.com/questions/supporting-companies-that-registered-in-estonia-through-e-residency https://support.stripe.com/questions/supporting-companies-th... (anyhow, Estonia borders Russia, invest at your own peril)
    - recuter 5y ago
      > And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency". That would be Xolo.io - but you really don't need a Stripe equivalent in Estonia or most places to incorporate. Registering a company is not that hard most places. I wouldn't recommend Estonia because you still need to open a business bank account for your new entity, that's the hard part. You don't need a C corp for a project like OP. He would want a bog standard LLC which is fiscally transparent for U.S. tax purposes. It gets more conveluted if he himself is not from the US as it would be treated differently by different countries. But it isn't hard, it is just boring to get going.
    - rmbyrro 5y ago
      I've been to Estonia twice. It's a great country with great people. I can assure you 99.8% of Estonians have negative interest in having ties to Putin's Russia. Putin is a thug - pardon the harsh opinion -, he wants to loot Ukraine riches. Estonia is a member of NATO and offers nothing for looting, as they have close to zero natural resources.
- laurent123456 5y ago
  Initially he could declare this as personal income, just like people who accept donations on open source projects. Once he gets many subscriptions, he can start looking at setting up a company.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Leaving aside whether you're likely to bring in any material amount of money, the logistics involved aren't that hard. You set up whatever payment processor you want, track whatever money comes in (paid to a doing business as entity if you like or just you personally), track business expenses (including computers etc. somewhat related to your business), and file any net income as part of your taxes.

eb0la 5y ago

Hmmm.. Is there a market for that?

nickjj 5y ago
> Hmmm.. Is there a market for that? I don't think it's as bad as the parent comment makes it out to be to accept payments. You don't need to register a company, you can act as a sole proprietor. This requires no paper work, fees or filing anything. You would need a bank account but most folks already have one, your personal checking account would work. You can grab and tweak a pre-made privacy policy in less than an hour if you decide to include one. I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes. Of course you need to still pay taxes in April, but you can deal with that then. Even if that wasn't true, the worst case scenario is you pay a fee for not filing every quarter. If you accepted payments and were making tons of money hiring an accountant wouldn't be an issue and if you were making close to nothing then you wouldn't have any fees since you have to be taxed $1,000 in the year to be on the hook for paying estimated taxes per quarter. The last point of writing code stands true tho. You would need to implement some type of payment accepting feature into your app. Fortunately accepting monthly or annual payments is fairly generic. Once you've implemented this in any app you can mostly drop it into another app without a huge amount of effort. It would mainly come down to little tweaks and making the UI match your app.
- tpetry 5y ago
  Don‘t forget that hn has international users. The rules you describe don‘t have to be the same for everyone. And there are a lot of countries with much bureaucracy.
- simmons 5y ago
  > I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes. I'm only chiming in here since I've become somewhat of a reluctant expert on estimated taxes over the years (assuming we're talking about the U.S. here; apologies to those outside the U.S.). And it happens to be fresh on my mind, since I tackled my Q1 taxes yesterday. ;) I've never heard anything about an exception for one's first self-employed year, so be careful with this. (But hey, the tax code is huge and complex, so I may just not know about it.) Although if you also have withholding from a W-2 job, it may cover you. Generally, everyone is supposed to pay a certain amount of estimated taxes throughout the year, self-employed or not. But for most people this will happen automatically through W-2 withholding. I suppose it could be a rational move to not worry about estimated taxes the first year, focus on your business instead, and eat any penalties/interest. (You wouldn't be the first to do this.) Or you could just make a guess on what you might owe, and send some money in advance of each estimated tax deadline. If you underestimate, I suppose the penalties/interest would be a lot less than if you avoided it altogether. If you overestimate, you get a refund (or if you choose, a carry-forward to the following year). Or you can do what I did 15 years ago, and spend a weekend studying IRS documents to understand how it all works, set up spreadsheets to calculate estimated taxes using the annualized method, and perform some minimal maintenance on it each year thereafter.

panick21_ 5y ago

Can you not just send e-mail with your IBAN asking for donations? If its so much money that it seriously impacts your taxes that seems like a great thing. At least that wouldn't be a big deal unless you get some serious cash. If you have the email of 250k users who all don't want to deal switching service. I can imagine getting a fair amount with a once a year ask for donations. Like more then making it a paid service, people usually are happy to give some money for things they use for free if its useful.

asvitkine 5y ago
The op literally said "(the money I could afford, but it's the time that is more valuable)".

criddell 5y ago

> You many need to register a company Shouldn't you do that anyway to protect yourself?