I don’t have a company, how can I be paid on the internet?
As per title. I would like to test some ideas online but I don’t have a registered company and I don't want to register any for something that will probably fail, since setup costs here are huge and burocracy is cumbersome.
How can I accept payments on a website as an individual with something similar to stripe or more complex e-commerce solutions like Shopify? Gumroad and PayHip look like good alternatives.
I would like to avoid crypto if possible, plus I'm based in Italy.
Is PayPal.me viable? Or is there something I’m not aware of?
#ask-ih
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From your question, I see three main options (depending on how much work you're willing to do and what kind of products you're looking to sell):
Gumroad is great and super easy if you're selling a downloadable product. If you're building a SAAS product or charging people for consulting, though, they're probably not a great solution. (PayHip I don't have any experience with, but they look pretty similar just with more fleshed out subscription support.)
Square (Obligatory referral link: https://squareup.com/i/HIZACKSHEP) isn't just for IRL transactions - they have both API access and integrations with shopping frontends like Magneto. When I signed up they didn't require as formal a company structure as Stripe, which was great for getting started.
Going down the road of registering a company, you don't actually have to register multiple companies, one for each idea you want to test. What I've done and what you could do is registered a single company that owns all of the ideas I want to try out (the same way Google, a single company, owns hundreds of Google products and experiments that are constantly starting and failing). This way you get the protection of being "Napolux Labs, Inc." instead of being liable personally if one of your products gets sued, and you only have to tackle the business of starting a business once. I am not sure how best to get started from Italy, but I would take a look at Stripe Atlas (https://stripe.com/atlas), which is a pretty straightforward "pay-one-price" way to get set up with a US Company, bank account, and Stripe Account.
I might be wrong about this, but I think when you create a Stripe account, you can select "Individual, sole proprietor, or single member LLC" and the business EIN number is optional. That's the case when you use Stripe Connect to create a Stripe account through a third party website (that's how people use my product), so it might be different for creating an account from scratch. But the form I'm looking at doesn't have anything that would prevent you from registering as a person.
Also, for what it's worth, I second @hizack about a single business to cover all of your ideas. That's what I do, too.
Looks like stripe doesn’t allow that in my country. I got in touch with their customer support btw.
For opening a company. The setup and recurring fees are in the order of 3K euros per year even if you don’t have any profit.
I want to test ideas, and pay taxes on possible profits as an individual to start.
Wow! Yeah, it's not cheap in the US, but much cheaper than that... I think it was maybe $500 to get set up and $500 - $1000 per year for an accountant and random tax stuff.
I've never used Stripe Atlas, which someone mentioned, but they set you up with a US company from anywhere in the world, so that might be a cheaper plan B for you.
Good luck! Tricky problem!
Am using @sahil 's gumroad.com for my MVPs. Superfast to set up. Their license key generation feature is what I use to validate my users. They also have an affiliate feature also which can help your project to grow.
Gumroad requires some files in order to create a subscription model !. in my case, I want to sell a membership with no files, so only the paid users can access to my SaaS, how I can achieve that using Gumroad ? for now, I am depending on PayPal Checkout.
I have created a recurring membership product in Gumroad. Using the license key feature as a paywall.
Been thinking about using this implementation in my MVP too. Curious how you went about prompting monthly payment? Just put up a paywall at the start of each month prompting them to go pay. Or extend your billing cycles so its not too regular?
EDIT: actually, just re-read the docs and if I'm intepreting correctly, you can set up a recurring payment linked to a license key, and check that license key on every log in/daily to see the status of their subscription?
Yes. You can check the validity of the license key. To add to that, I prefill the payment form with the unique user URL. So, I can ensure the license key is not used across multiple users.
1 user = 1 license key.
Hi napolux,
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