I went with option 3 using Paddle for my solo app (https://checkbot.io) and don't regret it even though it didn't seem nearly as popular as Stripe. I receive a single invoice a month that I declare as income on tax returns and that's it - I can sell worldwide and don't have to worry about county specific tax issues. Gumroad and Fastspring are similar I think but I haven't used them.
Option 1 sounds like asking for tax trouble to me and especially if you're small option 2 sounds like a lot of work where you're likely to make mistakes if you don't have a good idea of what you're doing and have the bandwidth to keep up with changing regulations. Selling for a year then finding out you've done the taxes and VAT collection wrong sounds like a world of pain to fix to me.
Willing to be proved wrong but I'm glad I ignored suggestions at the time that I could have saved a few % per transaction doing it myself. Getting good tax advice within my own country has been difficult enough so the merchant on record approach feels easily worth the cost for me.
Not OP, but I've been looking for something similiar, so thanks for suggesting Paddle - do you know if it is only aimed at US-based businesses selling worldwide or also other countries?
Comments
I went with option 3 using Paddle for my solo app (https://checkbot.io) and don't regret it even though it didn't seem nearly as popular as Stripe. I receive a single invoice a month that I declare as income on tax returns and that's it - I can sell worldwide and don't have to worry about county specific tax issues. Gumroad and Fastspring are similar I think but I haven't used them.
Option 1 sounds like asking for tax trouble to me and especially if you're small option 2 sounds like a lot of work where you're likely to make mistakes if you don't have a good idea of what you're doing and have the bandwidth to keep up with changing regulations. Selling for a year then finding out you've done the taxes and VAT collection wrong sounds like a world of pain to fix to me.
Willing to be proved wrong but I'm glad I ignored suggestions at the time that I could have saved a few % per transaction doing it myself. Getting good tax advice within my own country has been difficult enough so the merchant on record approach feels easily worth the cost for me.
Not OP, but I've been looking for something similiar, so thanks for suggesting Paddle - do you know if it is only aimed at US-based businesses selling worldwide or also other countries?
No, definitely not only open to US-based businesses: https://www.paddle.com/help/start/intro-to-paddle/which-coun...
if you are using stripe, you can use getrevin.com to manage your sales tax. An MoR but you get access to a stripe account and all their partners too.