Ask HN: Experience with offering monthly subscriptions?
6 by DangerousPie | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I run a mid-sized online community that has about 2 million pageviews a month, through a limited company in the EU. At the moment it is entirely financed through advertisements. This brings in just about enough money to justify running it, but I don't really like this model. Not only are the ads annoying (I even use an Adblocker myself) but I suspect that they are also not very good value for me. In addition, there are of course all the complications introduced by GDPR, which mean I am not even sure anymore if I should continue to use services like AdSense at all. Over the last few months and years I have been thinking more and more about introducing some sort of subscription feature, where members could pay a small monthly fee to become an official "supporter" of the site. This would then hide all ads, give them a little badge on their profile and maybe access to some bonus features in the future. However, I have been shying away from doing this so far, mostly because the tax implications sound very complicated. If I understand the rules correctly, I would have to charge each user VAT based on their home country and then report the VAT I have collected to each home country every month. And to do this, I might even have to register with the tax authorities in every country?! However, it seems like Stripe may have something to help with this [0] although that may be more US-focused. Has anybody here tried doing something like this? How complicated is this in practice? Or can anybody recommend a service that takes care of these issues for you? And what has the reaction from your users been like? I also recently came across Funding Choices from Google, which may do something like this with their Contributor feature [1]. Has anybody implemented this successfully? --- [0] https://ift.tt/2se7d4j [1] https://ift.tt/2GWWS1m
I run a mid-sized online community that has about 2 million pageviews a month, through a limited company in the EU. At the moment it is entirely financed through advertisements. This brings in just about enough money to justify running it, but I don't really like this model. Not only are the ads annoying (I even use an Adblocker myself) but I suspect that they are also not very good value for me. In addition, there are of course all the complications introduced by GDPR, which mean I am not even sure anymore if I should continue to use services like AdSense at all. Over the last few months and years I have been thinking more and more about introducing some sort of subscription feature, where members could pay a small monthly fee to become an official "supporter" of the site. This would then hide all ads, give them a little badge on their profile and maybe access to some bonus features in the future. However, I have been shying away from doing this so far, mostly because the tax implications sound very complicated. If I understand the rules correctly, I would have to charge each user VAT based on their home country and then report the VAT I have collected to each home country every month. And to do this, I might even have to register with the tax authorities in every country?! However, it seems like Stripe may have something to help with this [0] although that may be more US-focused. Has anybody here tried doing something like this? How complicated is this in practice? Or can anybody recommend a service that takes care of these issues for you? And what has the reaction from your users been like? I also recently came across Funding Choices from Google, which may do something like this with their Contributor feature [1]. Has anybody implemented this successfully? --- [0] https://ift.tt/2se7d4j [1] https://ift.tt/2GWWS1m
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