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by donjoe 1491 days ago
Hi, dev here, thanks for the input!

Fruits is a pivot for fanbase.com which sadly didn't make it. Within a few days, we managed to build fruits and launched it as the quickest MVP we could come up with. That's what you're seeing today. The imprint still points towards the current legal entity (fanbase GmbH). A new legal entity is currently under registration by the founders. Once the paperwork is done, the founders will move all assets to the new company and align the imprint accordingly.

Concerning taxation: this seems to be a clear improvement we need to work on communicating. Taxation is hard and we tried to break it down in a pricing calculator (which does not yet seem to do all that good of a job, point taken).

Disclaimer - as mentioned below/above in some of the comments: not the tax attorney ;-)

We are working with a tax office that helped us figuring out international taxation and will be able to answer all legal taxation questions in detail for each single country we're in business with.

Taxation for fruits essentially means:

- fruits charges the buyer and applies tax applicable for fruits (company in Germany) and the buyer in country XYZ

- each buyer will receive an invoice (issued by fruits)

- the seller will receive a single credit note for all sales performed within a month targeting a German company (fruits)

[Buyer] <<- Invoice (Tax) --- [fruits] <<- Credit note ->> [Seller]

3 comments

As someone who builds multiple products in this space, make sure you check if a credit note is valid for your purpose. It's not in NL, and it would get you in trouble with the tax authority. The proper solution is a self-billed invoice (though perhaps you're using that and just calling it a credit note!)
> Once the paperwork is done, the founders will move all assets to the new company and align the imprint accordingly.

Make sure that you deal with IP rights very carefully in that situation.

Also, the GP is right, you do need that impressum page.

I’ve used this before with good success on a few projects

https://www.taxjar.com/product/api

After a quick browse of the Tax Jar website I got the solid impression that they were US only. I saw mention of 'sales tax' but nothing about VAT, GST, HST, etc. No mention of international or shipping. And their pricing page which I normally find to be useful for this type of thing was actually totally confusing to me.

The one thing on the pricing page that jumped out at me was, "AI-driven product taxability recommendations"

AI recommendations and dealing with the tax authorities doesn't really seem like a sound choice.