probst

My co-founder and I have just closed a chapter in our lives and are about to embark on a new set of challenges. Before we get ahead of ourselves and build something no one needs, I would love to hear if there are:

1) any problems you frequently encounter that you would love to see go away 2) any tools you currently use that feel overly bloated and complex

Feel free to answer in the comments below or use the following form if you prefer: https://tally.so/r/wvBEKv

Thank you!

After having been a regular employee for years, I worked as a freelancer for a while. Going into my freelancing life I had no real mental model for how much of the money I earned was truly mine to spend, and how much of it I needed to set aside for taxes, vacations, retirement, and in case I got sick. I modelled this in Excel as best I could and was quite surprised both by how complicated it was to get right, and how much money I actually needed to set aside!

As my girlfriend also started freelancing last year, I decided to turn my Excel sheet into a little program she could use too, and in the spirit of sharing and helping others I would hereby like to make it available to you all too :)

My biggest take-away so far has been that most people dramatically underestimate how much they need to set aside, and forget to plan adequately for getting sick and for retirement.

You can find the tool here: https://howmuch.probsteide.com/

Comments, questions, and suggestions are more than welcome!

I wish you all a happy Easter Weekend!

In case you skipped to the bottom: you can find the tool at https://howmuch.probsteide.com/

Hello fellow HNewsers.

I would love to learn how you handle VAT (Value Added Tax – and other applicable sales related taxes) for your small (or large) SaaS businesses.

For example: the VAT rules are quite complex in the EU. The rate you pay is based on the location of the customer, rather than where you are located. In some countries elsewhere I know there to be a threshold you need to reach before you have to start paying. Additionally it seems the rules and rates keep changing.

My question to you is:

  - Do you handle this yourself? If so, how much time does it take?
  - Do you outsource it to a third party? If so to whom, and would you recommend them?
  - Do you altogether ignore it, and hope you won't be caught?

When first becoming consciously aware of the need to collect the applicable taxes myself I was quite surprised to find it wasn't something companies such as Stripe handles for you out of the box. It seems like a no-brainer service for a payment provider to handle?

There are services like Paddle which act as the merchant and deal with the taxes for you. Paddle comes at quite a hefty premium though (5% + 50c/transaction – meaning if you have a subscription price of 5EUR and sell to a customer in a country where the VAT is 20% VAT, the maths end up looking like: 5 - 20% - (50c + 25c) = 3.25EUR going to you. In other words Paddle effectively costs you 15% of the sales price...). The premium might of course still be worth it given they deal with all the bureaucracy.

Thanks for your time and suggestions!

Working with sensitive personal data is difficult at best of times, and anonymising such data properly devilishly tricky.

At Aircloak we have built a software layer that anonymises answers to SQL queries on the fly. We believe that the proof is in the pudding. Anyone can claim they are safely anonymising data but very few understand what it actually entails. Deleting names or social security numbers is far from sufficient.

The challenge works pretty much like a normal bug bounty only that in this case you get paid for breaking the anonymisation rather than for finding security bugs. We pay up to 5000USD per successful attack.

To make it easier for you, and harder for us, you also get full access to the raw unanonymized datasets that we are claiming to protect as well as the ability to run as many queries as you want through our system.

If you are interested you can find more information here https://challenge.aircloak.com.

By way introduction, my name is Sebastian and I am the CTO at Aircloak. I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have whether they be about our system, our stack, or anything else that you might find interesting.

Working with sensitive personal data is difficult at best of times, and anonymising such data properly devilishly tricky.

At Aircloak we have built a software layer that dynamically anonymises the answers to SQL queries on the fly. We believe that the proof is in the pudding. Anyone can claim they are safely anonymising data, but very few understand what it actually entails. Deleting names or social security numbers is far from sufficient.

The challenge works pretty much like a normal bug bounty only that in this case you get paid for breaking the anonymisation rather than for finding security bugs. We pay up to 5000USD per successful attack.

To make it easier for you, and harder for us, you also get full access to the raw unanonymized datasets that we are claiming to protect as well as the ability to run as many queries as you want through our system.

If you are interested you can find more information here https://challenge.aircloak.com.

By way introduction, my name is Sebastian and I am the CTO at Aircloak. I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have whether they be about our system, our stack, or anything else that you might find interesting.