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by hobofan 1064 days ago
> See mkdocs-material as a prime example

Then I hope you provide a better system for dealing with (or allowing the maintainers to deal with) taxes. Unless the maintainer of mkdocs-material somehow funnels the earnings through a US company, I'm almost certain that it's impossible to offer what they offer while being based in Germany without violation tax rules (as what they are offering is clearly a sale and not a donation, and Github doesn't issue any sales tax).
3 comments
mertbio 1064 days ago
Polar can cover the sales tax like Lemonsqueezy by being a merchant of record.
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troymc 1064 days ago
That's one way to do it, but it's extremely challenging. The sales tax can depend on where the buyer is located, where the buyer is from, where the seller is located, and where the seller is from. There are ~1000 jurisdictions for each of those four choices, so that makes for ~1000^4 different cases to handle. You'd also have to register as a merchant in each juridiction, and know the rules for when you have to start remitting sales tax to that jurisdiction. There are whole businesses built around managing that complexity, e.g. Avalara, Vertex and TaxJar (now part of Stripe). Maybe just offload that burden to one of them and focus on building your core innovation.
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reaperman 1064 days ago
> Maybe just offload that burden to one of them and focus on building your core innovation.

I don't think that's incompatible with their model. They absolutely could use Stripe to accomplish this transparently and not sacrifice any user experience.

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birk 1064 days ago
Yes, absolutely. Polar is built with Stripe today and will continue to be – leveraging Stripe Tax and additional offerings they have as we scale to build compliant & great user experiences at the same time.
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birk 1064 days ago
Yes, as we expand into services that will be key. Working with tax lawyers both in the US & EU along with Stripe to make sure we make it easier for maintainers than what it is currently via other platforms.
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charcircuit 1064 days ago
Unless they are a 503 (c) it wouldn't be a donation even if they gave nothing in return.
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