Stripe basically deals with the easiest parts (the technical) and leaves the hardest (or rather, the most energy draining) part for you as a customer/business owner (the bureaucracy of having a business in your country of choice). If you start accepting money, you need to pay taxes, no way around that.

Initially he could declare this as personal income, just like people who accept donations on open source projects. Once he gets many subscriptions, he can start looking at setting up a company.

Leaving aside whether you're likely to bring in any material amount of money, the logistics involved aren't that hard. You set up whatever payment processor you want, track whatever money comes in (paid to a doing business as entity if you like or just you personally), track business expenses (including computers etc. somewhat related to your business), and file any net income as part of your taxes.

Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estônia, for example.

One-stop-shop accountants will charge you 50-100 euros/mo and take care of everything.

They don't tax revenue, just distributed profits. As long as you keep the money in the business (even investing) or take a salary, you won't pay taxes in Estonia (assuming you don't live there).

> Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estonia, for example.

But not with Stripe, which always gives you a Delaware C corp as far as I understand. And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency".

Edit: oh nevermind https://support.stripe.com/questions/supporting-companies-th...

(anyhow, Estonia borders Russia, invest at your own peril)

> And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency".

That would be Xolo.io - but you really don't need a Stripe equivalent in Estonia or most places to incorporate. Registering a company is not that hard most places. I wouldn't recommend Estonia because you still need to open a business bank account for your new entity, that's the hard part.

You don't need a C corp for a project like OP. He would want a bog standard LLC which is fiscally transparent for U.S. tax purposes. It gets more conveluted if he himself is not from the US as it would be treated differently by different countries.

But it isn't hard, it is just boring to get going.

I've been to Estonia twice. It's a great country with great people. I can assure you 99.8% of Estonians have negative interest in having ties to Putin's Russia. Putin is a thug - pardon the harsh opinion -, he wants to loot Ukraine riches. Estonia is a member of NATO and offers nothing for looting, as they have close to zero natural resources.

basically if you start it up now with an email - service going away unless getting paid 1 per month, or one per 3 months even depending on how people feel it worth their time, figure out if it will be worth it, set up stripe, and then you have about a year to do accountant setup business.

I mean I am in Denmark and it isn't that difficult, and believe me Denmark is more difficult and entrepreneur unfriendly than most Western countries.