I was just the other day looking for a tool to easily move a non-sensitive file from my macbook, to my network-locked production machine. Rather than doing many hops through SSH tunnels, the easiest thing to do would be to host the file online, and wget it down to my linux machine.
The options out there were lacking. I used https://bashupload.com/ for a bit, but the problem is that after you download the file once, it gets deleted. Sometimes I want to share the file to multiple machines.
Hey everyone, I and the team have been hard at work improving ImprovMX since the acquisition at the start of this year. It was slow going at first, with lots of tech debt getting in the way of safely making changes. But after an initial slog, feature velocity got significantly faster, so it was quite worth it.
We've simultaneously launched a bunch of new features that you can checkout in our blog post:
- email logs search by keyword/date
- access logs to audit who did what when with your account
- longer email log retention
- rules routing for custom routing logic
- AI support chat bot
Really curious to hear any feedback, or what we should be building next!
I did a cross-country account migration for ImprovMX in January 2025.
It was a total nightmare, and definitely the vast majority of the acquisition migration work.
We ended up with a scheme where each customer was migrated over, as a "trial" account until it converted over to a regular paid subscription on the next subscription renewal time.
I wonder how you guys handle that.
We did see some similar services out there, but we didn't deem them high quality and trustworthy. It's kind of hard to build a reputation around a service you only use once. If our acquisition broker had said "use stripemove.com, we've done it many times, they're great", we probably would have forked over the cash immediately.
Consider reaching out to saas acquisition brokers!
I'm new to entrepreneurship and just signed my first few corporate legal agreements. I was also deeply aware that anything agreed to was basically a gentleman's agreement--it wouldn't be worth either party going to litigation over, and even less so if the other party was internationally based.
So I've been following the "no-assholes" policy as well.
I did actually find nslookup.io while researching whether I should build this or not, and based some of my user interface choices off what I saw there.
I ultimately decided to make inspector.improvmx.com because I wanted something simpler.
A lot of our customers at improvmx are non-technical (yet still want to figure out how to setup their DNS entries themselves or with our help, and hopefully never touch it again). I think nslookup.io is more powerful and gives more information, but a lot of our customers would take one look at the site and immediately their eyes would glaze over from the technical overload.
So it's ultimately less about things you could add, but rather the simple lack of features is something I'm looking for, which is targeting a different use case.
Anyway, please let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions for inspector.improvmx.com!
A few blogs mentioned that as an external US entity, you probably want to do VAT with Ireland (basically you deal only with Ireland for paying VAT, and what you pay gets forwarded through the system to all the other EU countries).
The reasons they cited were that it's in English, they have among the shortest initial application times (a few weeks vs. a few months for others), and that they're generally the most business friendly (which you can guess given how they attracted all the US tech companies as as tax haven).
In practice I've found this to be the case. I've had a few email chains with the Ireland tax authority, and they were responsive within a few days. And I got things done. Though I was surprised to find that the "best" EU tax authority was still worse than the IRS.
Things I was surprised by:
1) It takes an extremely long and complicated application form (and several weeks) to get an EU VAT number to pay VAT taxes. By comparison the IRS lets you get an EIN instantly, and you only need to fill out a few fields
2) Setting up a login to the Ireland Tax system is the worst thing in the world. I expected a simple username/password type system. Instead: you apply, then you have to remember a code, they don't give you any confirmation email, then 3 weeks later they send you an email giving you another code, and you have to hold onto that code, because you need to wait 72 hours for the database to update, before you can enter that code to create a certificate (but you don't know to use the first code or the second code), and you then need to save that certificate to your local machine, and re-upload it whenever you want to login. It's actually even worse than I describe, but I honestly cannot even remember all the steps
3) When filling in how much VAT you owe each country, you need to fill out every country and every amount manually, no way to upload a CSV or anything
If this is how bad Ireland is, I imagine other EU countries are even worse.
I recently acquired a SaaS that does business with people in the EU (we bill with stripe), so I decided to continue paying VAT. I do it all by a combination of code, scripts, and by-hand.
We have custom code that determines the VAT rate to charge, and also looks up a customer's VAT number to see if they qualify for VAT exclusion. At the end of each quarter I have a script that calculates the amount of VAT to be paid to each country in the EU, then visit the Ireland VAT OSS site, input the values for each country manually (they don't allow CSV!!!!), then send them a wire using wise.com.
The current scheme is an evolution of what the former founders did. It was a nightmare to get things onto good footing after the acquisition. But once I did it for the first time, the subsequent times are pretty straightforward, and I probably won't touch it again for a long while.
I could probably move towards stripe tax, or paddle/lemonsqueezy, but the migration would be a nightmare. And it's not a good business decision to do a lot of work including risky migrations to move onto a new provider that will charge a larger percentage as a service fee, just to better handle taxes, which I've now largely figured out.
The one advantage to doing all this, is that I actually understand this stuff pretty well now, rather than it being a black box where I just pay a company a lot of money so I don't have to think about it. Open question on if that's actually worth my time. It seems like it is for now.
One opinion I'll offer, is that all these foreign tax agencies are far less organized than you might think. You could probably get away by not paying VAT, for far longer/more revenue than you'd think, and if you do want to be a proper foreign business and pay, there's basically zero verification on if you're paying the right amount, so just try your best??
Feel free to ask me for any advice around VAT/etc. [email protected]
https://x.com/MatthewTse_/status/2042680214187315683
If they can fix tab complete, I'll give it another try!