Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

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Taxes are a huge deal for solo developers and tiny companies. Selling direct can be extremely complicated, especially if you want to properly follow every possible sales tax law which applies to you.

Putting your software on the App Store or Steam or similar (notably not Google Play[1]) means you're just getting paid royalties, not selling a product to individual customers.

[1] https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_us/about/developer-distribu...

"You are the merchant of record for Products you sell through the Store." I'd bet that 95% of smaller Android app developers have not hired an accountant to review every last detail, and therefore have failed to pay every cent of tax they owe. Unless you're very serious about starting a real business, it's a total nightmare.

Indeed you are correct and that's why it's generally simpler to use a service that acts as a reseller - i.e., they are the vendor of record. This means you shift all of the responsibility to them and you don't have to deal with it. Using the likes of PayPal / Stripe is not a good idea because you will be responsible for VAT compliance and with the newly introduced EU legislation, it can be a huge hassle - you need to deal with the MOSS at least. If you're selling software, I can recommend FastSpring - it's what the majority of Mac software houses use, it's highly customisable and they've been around for years.

Furthermore, if you're UK based and use a non-UK marketplace / reseller, then the revenue you receive from the reseller lies outside the scope of UK VAT and you don't have to do anything [1]

The reason why most EU developers on the App Stores don't deal with VAT is because the vendor of record is Apple Luxembourg, thus lies outside the scope. And that's precisely why Apple requires VAT invoices from Luxembourg-based developers.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/vat-how-to-work-out-your-place-of-supply-...

Another +1 for FastSpring, they've been fantastic to me. But there are other companies who do this too: Kagi & Avangate spring to mind, and Digital River bought & consolidated several companies that used to do this.

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