I feel you. And even if you get everything to run well on a VPS or Netlify, opening it up to a big user base, limiting liability and generating income is another huge battle. I’m working on a side project I want to transform into an entire self-sustaining business at the moment. When I first had the idea, I got a prototype of the key parts up and running in less than a month. Now it’s been like a year and I spent my days optimizing webpack chunk sizes, trying different pwa cache busting techniques, reading Stripe-integration docs, studying international VAT schemes, legal requirements, ...
The step from zero to product is way smaller than the step from product to law-abiding, income-generating service-providing business.
Edit: For those of you looking for a way to get simple prototypes working without having to use opinionated frameworks like Laravel or going down the JS rabbit hole, try Flask (in combination with SQLAlchemy and Marshmellow if you also need a simple ORM). Full flexibility, can be learned in minutes and you have the whole freedom of Python to do what you want.
Nice to hear I'm not alone, I am starting a similar journey myself. Any tips on minimizing the legal exposure?
As for the VAT, I am leaning towards paddle instead of stripe, because they take care of everything tax related (for a bit bigger piece of pie of course). Any thoughts on this?
I’m EU-based and my business is going to be B2C SaaS so these tips might not help you a lot. To minimize legal exposure the safest bet is to form a limited liability company wether that be a Spanish SL, a Dutch BV ir a German GmbH. Usually these also have a smaller counterpart which doesn’t require as much capital but still provides you with limited liability. If you need an US based corporation Stripe Atlas might also be of interest to you or if you need an EU-based one Estonia offers something called an eResidency and lets you create an EU business from abroad. Apart from that having an account take care of your taxes or at least proof-read your yearly filings seems like another step to limit you personal responsibility, even if a bit expensive.
As for VAT, I’m focusing on the EU market at the moment. EU law is that all SaaS B2C sales have to pay VAT in the country where the client resides, luckily there’s a process called mini one stop shop which allows you to file your VAT taxes in one EU country (while still indicating the country of every sale) which will then take care of the redistribution of the VAT taxes (a similar procedure exists for non-EU businesses who have EU customers, searching for EU VAT on e-Services should help you get started). With Stripe that means creating a taxId for every country and matching that with the country of residence my users have to provide on checkout when I create their session in the backend. Sadly I haven’t found any good applications that then take care of everything so it’s probably going to have to be a mix of csv importing everything into accounting software and handing everything to an account. It’s a bit frustrating tbh because it looks like accounting will be the single biggest expense in the initial phase of the business. So if anybody knows of a good solution for EU-wide SaaS B2C sales with Stripe I would be happy if they shared them. Even Quaderno and the like are not really feasible if you’re product costs less than 5$/month since they base their pricing on the number of sales.
Thank you for a detailed answer! Yes, I'm based in EU, but the customers could be from USA, AUS, India,... I am hoping to address all (well, most) of the markets from the start.
Btw, it might make sense to contact Quaderno (/others) and describe your pain point, they might be able to offer some solution.
Edit: For those of you looking for a way to get simple prototypes working without having to use opinionated frameworks like Laravel or going down the JS rabbit hole, try Flask (in combination with SQLAlchemy and Marshmellow if you also need a simple ORM). Full flexibility, can be learned in minutes and you have the whole freedom of Python to do what you want.