The Hidden Costs of Selling SaaS from Romania

It's nice to wake up with Stripe payment notifications! Then your accountant tells you all the implications of selling SaaS licenses from Romania and you can't sleep anymore 😅

A month ago, my biggest challenges were things like making sure a page was responsive or optimizing a database query. But now? Navigating the Romanian tax system for international SaaS sales feels like a whole new level of complexity. It’s almost enough to make me consider shutting down this little experiment because of the headaches involved.

Let me break down the numbers to give you a clear picture:

Since enabling Stripe on October 17th, I’ve sold 10 licenses for a total of €66. Stripe’s commission takes €4 (I think there’s also a VAT charge here), so I’m left with €62.

Then, my accountant charges €30 + VAT for processing up to 100 invoices each month (this doesn’t include the €84/month I already pay them for managing my PFA—let’s leave that out for now).

So after the accountant’s fees, I’m left with ~€26. Of course, I can have 90 more customers included in this price, but the idea is that you can't have a SaaS that barely makes any money, otherwise just accounting will kill it.

There’s also the tax that I need to pay in Romania, so I’ll be left with less than €20-€25 after this.

What about hosting? Well, Azure will cost me ~70EUR/month for the current usage, probably I can fit 100-200 more clients before I need to scale up, so I'm already losing money.

But it doesn’t end there...

Stripe collects VAT for each sale but leaves the actual VAT remittance to me. Within the EU, I can handle this through Romania’s OSS system, which simplifies things. But for non-EU countries like the UK, I’d need to register and remit VAT separately in each country where I have sales. I have no idea how much this would cost and I don’t intent to find out, so I refunded the customer for now and let them keep their license.

And there’s more: for Romanian customers, I also need to issue an e-factura (electronic invoice), which Stripe doesn’t support—so that’s on me too.

Given all this complexity, the simplest option might be to shut it down and refund the payments. But I’m not ready to give up yet! Instead, I’m looking into Paddle as an alternative.

Why Paddle?

Paddle acts as a Merchant of Record (MoR), essentially a reseller for my product. They handle all the VAT collection and remittance in each country, and they take care of compliance with local tax authorities. This means I’ll receive just one monthly invoice from Paddle, instead of needing to manage VAT and invoices for each individual sale. In theory, this should make everything much simpler—and hopefully let me get back to focusing on building features, not dealing with tax filings!

It’s a bit disappointing that I need to switch payment processors instead of working on new product features, but it’s a necessary step.

I'll keep you posted on the process once I’m done with the Paddle integration (still waiting for their approval).

📣 To my fellow Romanian SaaS creators—if you've faced these challenges and have any tips to share, I’d love to hear from you!