[bruce511]

You think of it as privacy and anonymity, but unfortunately this makes the business start to smell fishy, especially to tax authorities.

Tax folk are naturally keen on diligent record keeping. It helps them understand you aren't cheating on your taxes. Part of that is you doing things like charging vat.

Typically this means some "reasonable" measure of knowing where your customer is. It's not really enough for them to just "declare themselves outside the EU". If anonymity is important for the customer, then they pay VAT.

And yeah, forget donations. Hope is not a business strategy. That's a quick approach to zero revenue.