I'm suggesting that starting a project like this should involve consulting with an attorney and possibly an accountant.
It is important, generically, to be friends or at least have a relationship of some sort, with an attorney. This is all _really_ vanilla stuff and they should be able to assess the minimum requirements and financial outlay needed in less than 20 minutes.
You want to be very clear about what the thing is, where you stop and it starts, who owns it. If you're going to be taking money for doing the thing, you want to know how to pay taxes on it, and how to value it (now, when you create it, and later, in the event you plan on selling it).
Make a plan, talk to the attorney about the plan, and understand what steps need to be taken to protect yourself and the project.
You can certainly play fast and loose; it'll probably be fine. You may have to play fast and loose if you have no resources. But there are lots of people who have gotten very badly burned by not paying attention to the rules and fine print in the contract(s).
Examples of things going badly include Redis and CCR, just off the top of my head.
where i'm currently based, every single cent that can be considered income is tracked and taxed. plus i would have to declare its origin. so there's definitely some legal set up before monetization
You may in fact decide to explicitly never monetize it, which is a perfectly reasonable decision.
You may also find that there are ways of setting the thing up so that you aren't paid (at least not right now if it's not convenient to be paid) but the thing is able to collect money and use that money to do $RANDOM_BUSINESS_THINGS like pay for hosting and maybe eventually hire a developer...
It's likely that this is all really simple stuff, to someone who knows exactly how thing work in $LOCAL_LEGAL_REGIME
It is important, generically, to be friends or at least have a relationship of some sort, with an attorney. This is all _really_ vanilla stuff and they should be able to assess the minimum requirements and financial outlay needed in less than 20 minutes.
You want to be very clear about what the thing is, where you stop and it starts, who owns it. If you're going to be taking money for doing the thing, you want to know how to pay taxes on it, and how to value it (now, when you create it, and later, in the event you plan on selling it).
Make a plan, talk to the attorney about the plan, and understand what steps need to be taken to protect yourself and the project.
You can certainly play fast and loose; it'll probably be fine. You may have to play fast and loose if you have no resources. But there are lots of people who have gotten very badly burned by not paying attention to the rules and fine print in the contract(s).
Examples of things going badly include Redis and CCR, just off the top of my head.