Monitoring is a good idea. However, pixel-based comparison services are quite pointless for web pages. Banners, dynamic content etc. simply drives spam.
Try Browserbite with its feature-based comparison. There are other regression-oriented tools out there as well that use pixel-based methods as well.
There is a dividend tax, making this business environment expecially lucrative if your plan is to reinvest profits.
VAT is 20%
Income tax for physical person is 20% and the company has to pay on top of it roughly 33% of social taxes. There's a plan in place to reduce social tax by 1%
Other than being able to establish a company in Estonia there doesn't seem to be anything compelling about this. Those tax rates - 20% VAT and 33% social taxes - are not friendly. You have to rely on a third party for a mailing address just to open the company. And if you want to try to open a bank account you have to visit.
> Those tax rates - 20% VAT and 33% social taxes - are not friendly.
If selling in Europe (common tax area), VAT is mandatory at the point of sale. If the seller is outside Europe (common tax area) and purchaser in Europe (common tax area), the receiver of goods or services is liable to need to pay the tax, and buyers don't like tax/price surprises at point of import or use.
As for social taxes... if there are no Estonia resident employees this doesn't seem an issue.
For bank account - this seems like a headache - for banks as much as anyone, as they have to provide anti-money lending screening, which means 'know your customer' which means a physical visit from the customer. I'm sure Estonia has branches of HSBC, Citi, or other international networks, and they're working on, for example, allowing you to walk into a HSBC/Citi/etc located near where you are, and do the KYC from there. For me, this is the deal-breaker. If opening a bank account can happen without need to visit Estonia, then I'd try this, otherwise, without being able to receive or make payment, it is a nice idea but not in my use-case.
I think the small benefit here is that they let you do everything online. And they take that serious. In any other EU country there will probably be something you'll have to do in person.
So this also means you can live the nomad life. Although I guess this isn't their (only) target audience.
Doing business is a separate (though connected) subject. The e-residency is broader than business alone.
For business you'll need an accountant to do tax-related work. You'll probably be able to find one which you can communicate with online, so your nomad lifestyle is still safe.
It gets a lot more attractive (at least compared to other EU countries) if they would take the next step and simplify tax work so you don't need to spend sums like €2000-€3000 on an accountant every year.
I would expect that VAT is only relevant for products sold to Estonian residents and income/social tax only relevant if you employ residents of Estonia.
Income tax is typically based on residency, I believe the US is the only developed country in the world that taxes non-residents on income.
As I understood it, as of 2015 EU digital goods VAT must be paid based on the VAT in the customers country, regardless of whether the sellers business is located inside or outside the EU.
If so, what's the downside of having your business based in Estonia vs the US with respect to VAT?
If you and your small business are based in the US then you could ignore the VAT nonsense when selling to the customers from the EU [1]. It's not in the interest of the IRS to make you pay taxes in Europe.
"Key drivers for Estonia’s high rank are its relatively low corporate tax rate at 21 percent with no double taxation of dividend income, a nearly flat 21 percent income tax rate, a property tax that only taxes the value of land and not the value of building and structures, and a territorial tax system that exempts 100 percent of foreign profits."
I'm the competitor nirvdrum was mentioning (Browserbite). We had a very nice founder-to-founder talk and we have gone through quite a few of the same failures that he has. I have all the respect for nirvdrum. Most people don't manage to hang on that long.
To be honest, I was sorry to see mogotest go, because it shows that there might not be any business in cross browser testing. But there is! In my eyes it was a valid effort on all fronts - trying to build a community and handling lots of browser vendor irregularities. He was one of the first ones. But the market wasn't there, yet.
Good luck! The cross browser testing space will miss him!
Akamai uses a different way to count the usage compare to Net Applications. Hence the difference. Also, Akamai's presence in China is somewhat of a question.
Well - that's enough work to maintain your own app. Maintainging a fork of Rails and drilling through all of the vulnerabilities - that's an extra overhead. It's simpler to regression test your own app, I suppose.
I disagree that it's simpler to regression test your own app. The recent minor-minor version upgrade passed Rails core tests, as well as test suites at high profile Rails users, yet it contained a regression that caused the disclosure of some sensitive issues at those same high profile shops.
It's easier, from my viewpoint, to stick it out at a release that you know works for you, applying patches from the files contained in the CVEs. There's still a chance that the security patch will cause a regression, but at least you're not pulling in all the interim commits.
Yes, it is possible! Can you drop me an e-mail (you can find it on our site) on how do you plan to use the service for this purpose. Skype call could be best!
We're planning to have monthly subscription that would include 50-100 comparisons (depending on how many configurations you want to have in the package) for $99 per month. Priority processing is for all paying customers, of course.
There's also going to be Enterprise pricing that includes - scripting support, testing behind firewalls and some other extras.
You can write a whole PhD thesis about it. Basically it is a result of a 2+ year research project how to detect differences that are relevant to people. In fact the computers find a lot more differences when you compare pixel-by-pixel. The keywords are machine vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning.
The hardest part of working out the right balance of what to detect was to make the algorithm less picky without losing an eye for detail.
We've benchmarked the algorithm against professional layout testers and the fault detection quality is on the same level with them.
We are suffering an overload right now. Normally a test does run in 20-30 seconds. We're doing everything we can to serve all the users that have signed up today and scale our servers.
I have results - I'm impressed with the quality of the output - especially that errors aren't cascaded! I would spend more time looking at it now but unfortunately it takes a while to load each screenshot currently. I'll check back tomorrow when your servers have had time to recover.
Do you have plans to support different (user configurable) window sizes? My site uses media queries to differ the appearance based on browser size, which means the older IEs can't help but fail to look the same as modern browsers.
Try Browserbite with its feature-based comparison. There are other regression-oriented tools out there as well that use pixel-based methods as well.