No company, no VAT number, no accountant — what can I actually take money with

Sorry if this is the wrong section, I read the sticky and I think it's right but tell me if not.

So the background is I've been building a small tool for about seven months, it's a thing that does one boring job for people who run stores, and last month three separate people asked me if they could pay for it. Which was not the plan, the plan was to give it away and see if anyone cared. Anyway now people want to pay and I have absolutely nothing set up.

I don't have a company. I'm not registering one until I know this is real, and I've been told registering one costs money I don't have yet. Every processor I looked at wants a business name, a registration number and a bank account in that name on step two of the signup. Stripe wanted all three before it would even show me the dashboard.

What I've got is: a personal bank account, a laptop, some crypto on an exchange from years ago, and a landing page. Price would be 15 a month or 120 a year, and realistically maybe forty people in the first six months if I'm lucky.

What do people actually plug in at this stage? Thanks in advance to anyone who answers.

you skipped the only part that matters. who are the forty people and where are they. a store owner in ohio is a completely different answer to a store owner in kyiv

Sorry, you're right. The three who asked are all EU, two Germany one Netherlands. The waitlist is about sixty percent EU and the rest is US and a few in Brazil.

The short version is that the whole hosted crypto gateway category exists for exactly your situation. NowPayments and Coinremitter both take an email address and a password at signup and nothing else — no company name, no registration number, no bank. You get an API key and a hosted checkout page the same afternoon.

The honest catch, and you should hear it now rather than in month nine: they all reserve the right to ask for documents later if your volume climbs or someone reports you. At forty customers paying fifteen a month you are nowhere near anyone's threshold. If this becomes a real business you will have this problem again at a much better moment to have it.

The other catch is the one you actually need to think about. Your buyers are EU store owners. Ask yourself honestly how many of them are going to pay a fifteen euro subscription in usdt.

This is the right answer and the last paragraph is the important one. Forty EU shop owners is a card audience, not a crypto audience.

OP: of the three people who asked to pay, how did they offer? Did any of them say crypto or did you assume it?

One of them said he could send usdt. The other two just said "how do I pay you" and I didn't have an answer so I said I'd get back to them. That was eleven days ago and one has stopped replying.

So the conversion problem killed a third of your customer base before you had a checkout. Good to know the funnel works.

Had the identical thing in 2022 - little tool, people asking to pay, no entity, no appetite to make one yet. What I did then was take crypto from whoever offered it and send a plain bank details email to everyone else, and it was fine for about the first thirty customers because thirty is a number you can handle by hand.

The bit I'd do differently now is NowPayments' card checkout for the non-crypto ones. Customer types a Visa number into a page, the rail converts, you get crypto out the other side, and you are not the merchant of record so nobody asks you for a company. It is not cheap - call it four percent all in - and it declines more than a real acquirer does. On a fifteen euro monthly that decline rate will hurt you more than the fee.

What's your churn assumption? Because a card that declines on the rebill in month three is the same as a cancellation and you won't know which it was.

Nobody has said this so I will, briefly, and then I will stop.

Not having a company does not mean the income does not exist. In most of the EU you can invoice as a natural person perfectly legally, and in Germany specifically the Kleinunternehmer threshold is high enough that forty customers at fifteen a month sits comfortably underneath it. You are not avoiding anything by not registering; you are only avoiding the paperwork that would let you deduct the hosting.

I am aware this is not the answer the thread wants.

nobody cares, but you're right

Thank you all, genuinely. hana_v for the signup detail, Ravenstack for making me actually go and ask, grubstake88 for the card thing which I hadn't heard of, and quietaccountant, I did not know that about the threshold and I'm going to read about it tonight.

Going to put up the crypto checkout this weekend since it costs nothing to try and email the two silent ones.

Promised I'd report back.

Eleven paying customers now. Nine of them paid crypto without complaining, which is more than anyone in this thread predicted including me. Two wanted cards and I have not solved that so they are paying by bank transfer to my personal account, which everyone here would probably tell me not to do.

Signup on NowPayments was email and password exactly as described, took maybe twenty minutes including reading the API docs. Nothing has been asked of me. The annual plan converts much better than monthly, which I assume is because people don't want to think about a crypto payment twelve times a year.

Still no company. Reading about the threshold thing was useful, thank you again.