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Ask HN: How to Incorporte on a Limited Budget?

2 points by a_imho ↗ HN
Is incorporating a company necessary to sell services as SaaS but limit personal liability?

If yes, where is the cheapest/easiest to incorporate as a European/International including all associated costs? Something like Stripe Atlas is way too expensive for a small project.

5 comments

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garethgilson
What kind of liability are you looking to limit? Would something like errors and omissions insurance or some other policy provide enough protection, at least to get you started?
a_imho
All kinds of liability, better safe than sorry. Runaway cloud costs from a misconfigured job, serial chargebacks from malicious users.
mytailorisrich
Where are you located?

Look at your own country's procedure to incorporate a company, it may be simple enough. For example if you're in the UK I doubt anything will beat simply registering a limited company, but not all countries make it so simple and cheap...

Just checked and Atlas is priced at USD500. That's probably cheaper than the total cost of incorporating in many EU countries so if that's too expensive then incorporating is probably too expensive full stop unless you live in a 'cheap' country like the UK.

a_imho
Hungary, and setting up a limited company starts at ~$10k here.

Indeed, UK is one of the options I'm looking at[1]. Compared to the alternatives I checked (e.g Estonia) it seems too good to be true, so I'm a little worried about hidden costs of running a business there, especially as a non resident.

Stripe Atlas starts at $500, but then you have franchise tax added on top of that and it quickly adds up if you need an accountant not to miss a tax filing (even though the cloud credits sound nice). For launching a funproject which will probably never generate that kind of money I can't justify the outlay.

[1]https://medium.com/@trevormydata/week-2-incorporating-a-comp...

mytailorisrich
I am in the UK and I can confirm that the article you quote is accurate. You can manage the company (annual accounts return, tax return) online.

Two things, though, if you are not residing in the UK:

1. The company must have a registered office address in the UK. There are plenty of companies providing that service for an annual fee (usually about £30 per year but, obviously, extra fees to forward mail).

2. It may be difficult to open a bank account either in the UK or in Hungary.

But to be honest, if you don't expect to generate even in the range of $500 then incorporating will likely be too costly however you look at it.