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Marc Köhlbrugge
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@marc
I use Cloudflare + Fastmail. It's $5/mo for unlimited emails and domains I think. I've been using this setup for years and it's perfect.
Cloudflare provides you with MX records for your domain names. This means all incoming emails will first arrive at Cloudflare, which you can configure to then forward these emails to your one Fastmail account. This is free I believe.
Fastmail is a $5/mo email account. Incoming emails are already being forwarded via Cloudflare to your Fastmail inbox. You can then also configure Fastmail to send emails from these domain names. These are known as aliases. You can have as many as you want.
It might be possible to have Fastmail also handle incoming emails so you can skip the Cloudflare step. I'm not sure, but it's something you could look into if you're not already using Cloudflare for DNS.
Thanks Marc! This looks like a solid setup. I'll look into this.
Singapore. Typically you want to incorporate where you do (most) of your work.
This is probably the right answer, confirmed by some online searches and opinions from other communities. The downside is (at least here in Spain) it is really bureaucratic and painful to be a small business.
The one issue I ran into this, is that whenever someone would ask for a proper invoice, I'd need to generate it with the above calculation. I think Quaderno did this for me.
But then if the customer was a business in say Germany (where I'd take the same approach, but 19%), they might then later provide their VAT ID and ask for their paid VAT back. As technically they don't need to pay it.
I'd need to tell them that if they provided their VAT ID, the base price would be $100 again (and so they didn't gain anything). Bit hard to explain to people 😅
I don't use Stripe Tax, but when I was incorporated in the Netherlands I would just charge everyone the same amount (e.g. $100), and then retroactively decide what percentage was VAT.
So if the customer was in the Netherlands (e.g. based on their credit card country + IP address), I would do $100 / 1.21 = $82.64 as base price, and the remainder as VAT.
The one issue I ran into this, is that whenever someone would ask for a proper invoice, I'd need to generate it with the above calculation. I think Quaderno did this for me.
But then if the customer was a business in say Germany (where I'd take the same approach, but 19%), they might then later provide their VAT ID and ask for their paid VAT back. As technically they don't need to pay it.
I'd need to tell them that if they provided their VAT ID, the base price would be $100 again (and so they didn't gain anything). Bit hard to explain to people 😅
Where are you incorporated now? I'm having to think about this as I will have to start charing users for jobsinenglish.dk soon.
Judging by my invoice for WIP.co membership, it's incorporated in Singapore.
Singapore. Typically you want to incorporate where you do (most) of your work.
This is probably the right answer, confirmed by some online searches and opinions from other communities. The downside is (at least here in Spain) it is really bureaucratic and painful to be a small business.
I'm using Stripe Tax and Stripe Checkout, which calculates the tax and generates the invoices + receipts. It works nicely. Need to do a followup call with my accountant to discuss it further.
What's the reason he wants you to charge tax where Stripe Tax dictates zero?
I’m not sure we need to look into it together more, they have experience with other PSP but not Stripe yet
@levelsio had an internet issue. Not sure about my double comments 😅
Self-promotion in a community like WIP is a delicate issue. It's fine if it happens occasionally, but if you condone or even facilitate it too much it you quickly attract the wrong crowd ruining it for everybody.
That said, I do like the more general idea of "pinning" a post or somehow given more weight to one post or another.
I think dev.to has a feature where you can pay a small amount to promote a bulletin board post. It can be used for anything. From promoting your launch, posting a job listing, etc. It being paid means it's less likely to be abused I think. That's something we could explore.
Same in the Netherlands and I think the rest of Europe. It's one of the reasons I moved out.