>250k monthly users, but all the time and a lot of the costs are borne by me and where I'm at now I don't have the time
are you not able to let any of these people know they need to pay or the service will go away soon? I mean 250K 1 dollar a month?
are you not able to let any of these people know they need to pay or the service will go away soon? I mean 250K 1 dollar a month?
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".
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.
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).
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-th...
(anyhow, Estonia borders Russia, invest at your own peril)
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.
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.
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.
Shouldn't you do that anyway to protect yourself?
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.
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.
http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-falla...
I don't think there is a lot of reason to be careful in this case.
About 1% of the people shown an ad (or any content) will even consciously acknowledge it, while approximately 1-3% of the remaining 1% will interact with it, and then 1-5% of that remaining group will actually buy the product. The 99% who didn't acknowledge its existence in the first place don't actually factor into anything other than how much you get charged for the ad.
The difference between the article and the OP's scenario, is that the OP already filtered the 99% and converted the rest. Now there is only one conversion left, which is to make them into paying customers, which is a much higher rate than 1% when you already have a captive audience.