Did anyone actually build a tax module for this or is it still just Stripe/PayPal bare bones
I ask because I looked at KnownHost's open-source fork last year and the VAT handling was basically "hope your accountant doesn't ask questions" — https://www.knownhost.com
Been a week so I wanted to check back.
Coming back to this after a week — did you ever figure out the tax piece? I run a tiny reseller setup on HostHatch and even a basic VAT calc would be make-or-break for me.
Monolith makes sense for now but I'd want to see a plugin hook for tax rules before I commit time to testing.
Tax engine is hard. I looked at TaxJar and Stripe Tax but both want money every month
For Time4VPS this kills margin
Maybe open-source tax rate database + basic nexus tracking? Not perfect but ships
Did anyone solve EU VAT without paid service? I hear horror stories about MOSS filings
Also 11 days quiet, sorry. Day job ate my energy
Repo is private still because code is embarrassing. Will clean and push this weekend maybe
Monolith it is. Thank you cpanelliw780 and PascalOvid, you saved me from Kubernetes hell
Oh wow 15 days, sorry I vanished
Tax engine is on the list but I pushed it back because it scares me. Stripe has Stripe Tax now which handles the calculation side, so I was thinking of leaning on that for US/EU at least. For anything else maybe pluggable thing where host can drop in their country's rules
This is actually the plan. No cPanel, no Plesk, just talking to Hestia or plain Proxmox or even SSH+cloud-init. The gap I keep hitting is that existing panels all want to be everything or they want $40/month before you have ten clients
Still monolith for now, one Node process, one Postgres. I'll split later if I ever have that problem
Did anyone here actually try Stripe Tax in production though. The pricing feels vague and I don't want to eat surprise fee on $5 invoice
Every jurisdiction wants something different and the rules change constantly For a Time4VPS I'd honestly look at what Contabo does with their managed tax overlay, it's basically a separate service you call into rather than building it yourself. Keeps the monolith clean Monolith is definitely the right call to start. You can always split later when you actually have the traffic to justify it
Member
It's been quiet for three weeks.
21 days and nobody mentioned tax, good catch pam3
This is actually the thing that kills most diy billing projects because every jurisdiction wants something different and Stripe Tax only covers like 40 countries last I checked
If youre doing US only its manageable but the second someone in EU buys something you need MOSS handling and then youre in a world of pain
Honestly if I were building this today I wouldnt even touch tax myself Id just integrate with a merchant of record like the fictional ones and let them deal with it but those take bigger cuts so I get why a Time4VPS would avoid them
Still think monolith is the way to go though Hana5 just build the thing and worry about architecture when you have actual customers complaining
Still curious about the tax question above. 22 days later, did you ever land on a solution for that?
Most tiny hosts I know end up manually patching tax lines onto invoices because the open source options just don't handle it. Even Stripe Tax has gaps once you're outside the US/EU handful.
If you're building from scratch anyway, worth deciding early whether you want to bake in a tax engine or stay dumb and let the gateway handle it.
Member
Did anyone actually build this or did it stay in the "architecture debate" phase forever?
This is the real blocker for any billing panel that wants to be taken seriously. Stripe handles US sales tax now but EU WHAT is a nightmare and most open source projects just pretend it doesn't exist. If Hana5 ever comes back, that's the first thing I'd want to see on the roadmap.
Monolith vs microservices doesn't matter if you're getting sued by tax authorities.
