Unfortunately I’m not able to accept payments from users located in the European Union at this point.
The reason for excluding EU citizens for this service is that VAT rules have been introduced by the EU that place a heavy administrative burden on a seller of digital services. It is virtually impossible for me to conform to these rules if I want to offer a paid digital service to individuals in the EU. Some background information about these rules can be found on this page.
As a provider of a paid digital service to a customer in the EU, I basically have to gather multiple pieces of evidence that you, the customer, are indeed from the country you say you are from. Then I need to store that data securely and keep it available & secure for years. I would also need to deal with different VAT rates across the 28 member countries, file my VAT filings more frequently and potentially deal with enquiries from 28 tax authorities.
A few member states have introduced a minimum threshold of revenue before these burdensome VAT rules apply. This to spare small businesses from the effects of the rules. An exception for small businesses makes a lot of sense to me, because the rules seem to be primarily written to target large multinationals like Facebook and Google. Unfortunately the country I live in (The Netherlands) has not made an exception for small businesses. Paradoxically, the EU VAT rules for digital services actually favor large multinationals, because they can easily expend the resources to comply with them, whereas this is simply not viable for many small businesses. It is no surprise that many of those businesses have simply stopped accepting EU customers. I have little choice but to do the same.
So please do not register for this site or make a payment to use the premium service if you are a citizen of a EU country! Payments will not be accepted.
I’m disappointed that I can’t realistically offer a simple digital service to a significant percentage of the visitors of this site, without breaking laws.
There is talk of an exemption for small businesses and that this will be introduced at the EU level at some point in the future. When that will be, I do not know. It could take years. Until that time, I’ve decided not to offer the premium service to citizens from EU countries. I simply have no other choice if I do not want to break these rules.