At the moment it is entirely financed through advertisements. This brings in just about enough money to justify running it, but I don't really like this model. Not only are the ads annoying (I even use an Adblocker myself) but I suspect that they are also not very good value for me. In addition, there are of course all the complications introduced by GDPR, which mean I am not even sure anymore if I should continue to use services like AdSense at all.

Over the last few months and years I have been thinking more and more about introducing some sort of subscription feature, where members could pay a small monthly fee to become an official "supporter" of the site. This would then hide all ads, give them a little badge on their profile and maybe access to some bonus features in the future.

However, I have been shying away from doing this so far, mostly because the tax implications sound very complicated. If I understand the rules correctly, I would have to charge each user VAT based on their home country and then report the VAT I have collected to each home country every month. And to do this, I might even have to register with the tax authorities in every country?! However, it seems like Stripe may have something to help with this [0] although that may be more US-focused.

Has anybody here tried doing something like this? How complicated is this in practice? Or can anybody recommend a service that takes care of these issues for you? And what has the reaction from your users been like?

I also recently came across Funding Choices from Google, which may do something like this with their Contributor feature [1]. Has anybody implemented this successfully?

---

[0] https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/tax-calculation

[1] https://support.google.com/fundingchoices/answer/7279083?hl=en&ref_topic=7279185