How to buy most software 'tax-free'

Field notes on a subcultural practice, not tax or legal advice. For your own use case, consult a tax advisor or the tax authority. What you do with it is your decision and your responsibility. ✌

Met a buddy who came back from Florida buzzing. Instead of our 21 % VAT his receipts had ~7 % sales tax (6 % state plus a county surtax of 0 to 2 %, typically 1 %), and Florida does not have a state income tax at all. A stateless utopia for a tax serf from Vinohrady. Software is a different league though. Florida taxes sales tax only on tangible personal property and a narrow list of named services. SaaS, cloud subscriptions, API access? Outside the tax base, the Department of Revenue has held this position consistently since TIP 10A01-01. So the Anthropic Max plan with a FL billing address pays exactly zero in sales tax. $100 = $100, no surcharge on top. A few days later, while filling out the Anthropic Max checkout, I noticed those $21 extra... and figured out you can claim Florida from Prague too. This scenario is not limited to Anthropic. Basically any SaaS with a checkout aimed at the EU adds the same 21 % on top. The mechanics are identical in each of them, almost everything runs through Stripe Tax or Paddle and both read the same signals. I am using Anthropic's Claude Code as the example because that is the one I just dealt with. The principle applies pretty much everywhere.

Why software costs a fifth more in the EU

Take any SaaS you subscribe to in the EU. Stripe Tax or Paddle slap 21 % VAT on top because they see EU billing. Welcome to the Union.

Monthly subscription

€100/ month

No VAT

€1,200

per year, no VAT

With 21 % VAT

€1,452

per year, EU customer

Annual VAT paid

€252

what goes to the state

VAT on digital services applies based on the customer's country. Anthropic collects it, remits it via the EU OSS (One-Stop Shop, formerly MOSS), and on into the Czech treasury. The tax serf foots the bill, the state pockets the proceeds. "Consumer protection."

How Anthropic spots a European customer

The main signal is the billing address on the account, that is how Anthropic picks the tax jurisdiction. Under the hood, Stripe Tax most likely runs as well, and reaches for these other signals when things get fuzzy:

Card billing address (primary source of truth)
Card BIN (the prefix tells you the issuing bank, hence the country, fallback)
IP address (last resort, Stripe itself reportedly does not recommend it for taxes)

In practice it is usually enough for the billing address to scream "EU" and the VAT sticks. The other way around: a US address, a US card and a quiet IP, and the tax logic counts you as a US customer. And you know what? Anthropic is not routing around any state. It just reads what comes in. The fingerprint is what the customer feeds it. If they want to.

The 5-step recipe

VPN to Florida

e.g. a Mullvad exit node hides the EU IP and serves up a US location.

Clean account

New email, TOTP instead of SIM, ...

US address

Florida address with a valid ZIP so the tax logic reads a US customer.

US-looking card

Revolut multi-use from a FL VPN, or a Bitrefill prepaid Visa with a US BIN bought for sat.

Stay in character

VPN active on every rebill, Anthropic may re-check jurisdiction.

1. VPN to Florida

Florida is in their book the sweet spot. SaaS is not subject to state sales tax there (TIP 10A01-01 and the follow-on TAAs). In US states where SaaS is taxable (NY, WA, TX, ...) Stripe Tax would add sales tax. FL would not. The price stays clean. $100 = $100. If you already have a VPN with a fitting location, yours will do just fine. If you do not have one yet, I have three favorites and they all share one thing: you can pay for them with Bitcoin. 🧡

Mullvad IVPN NymVPN

2. Clean account at the provider

An existing account with Czech history is considered a burned bridge. The provider (whether Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel or anyone else) has fraud detection that probably remembers IP, phone, and card from past sessions. Better to spin up a fresh account, with a new email and the VPN already on. No Czech trail, no leak from the past.

3. US billing address

A US address goes into the checkout. It just needs to exist and the ZIP needs to match the city. An address can be generated on fl.postcodebase.com. It spits out real streets with a valid ZIP and city (it pulls postal data, so these are more or less actual households, ethical note...).

Random FL address

4. A card that does not scream EU

Here the gray zone ends and the money starts. A Czech card has an EU BIN, but in practice Stripe Tax pulls primarily from the billing address. How strict the BIN check at Anthropic is sits in a black box. The subculture has two paths, one convenient, one clean.

Option A: Revolut over VPN

Less anonymous, but faster and does not require a sat. You issue a temporary multi-use virtual card in Revolut (must be multi-use, single-use will not survive a rebill). Run the whole payment plus checkout from a laptop with VPN connected to Florida. Stripe Tax then sees FL billing as the primary signal and FL IP as supporting. The UK/LT BIN of the card does not override that, because BIN is a secondary input in the decision logic. The tax jurisdiction settles on US. The trade-off is privacy, not price. Revolut obviously knows the transaction in detail, the bank logs the merchant and the amount, but the tax jurisdiction never sees when or how the EU resident used it. For someone who already lives inside Revolut, it is a five-minute setup.

Option B: Bitrefill → US prepaid Visa (more anonymous)

If you want a cleaner digital trail, you go through Bitcoin. BIN and payment both scream "US", and the whole transaction never leaves the sat in / sat out loop.

More anonymous optionBitrefill Virtual Visa USASat in, US BIN out. You buy it with on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning or stablecoins, the virtual Visa with a US BIN lands in your inbox within minutes, US merchants and online only. At purchase Bitrefill takes the cardholder's first and last name, and keeping the same name in the Anthropic billing details is a good idea. Strict cardholder name matching is not standard, but custom Radar rules sometimes pick it up. No US bank account, no ITIN. Bitrefill reserves the right in its ToS to ask for KYC on suspicious volume, the cap tends to be around 1,000 USD aggregated over 7 days. An aesthetic experience in itself. 🧡

Digital Prepaid Card

5. Stay in character

Stripe Tax locks the tax jurisdiction to the billing address from when the subscription started, and does not recalculate it on rebill. What does fire on every rebill is Stripe Radar (anti-fraud). If the IP jumps from FL to Prague, you can get a 3DS challenge, a decline, or the card blocked for further attempts. So keep the VPN on whenever you touch the billing portal or a rebill is near.

Gray zones and risks

Anthropic TOS violation? In their reading, almost certainly. US-only billing for a non-US customer is a gray area under the license agreement. Worst case: it lands at account ban, refund, or nothing. A civil-law issue between customer and Anthropic. From the Czech tax authority's perspective: as a consumer (B2C) you have no obligation to remit VAT yourself, that sits with the supplier. As a business (B2B) you should be doing reverse-charge yourself, but if Anthropic does not see an EU address, the transaction never shows up in the EU system at all. A gray zone the subculture moves through knowingly and with a smile. The optimal play is minimizing personal data.

The point

Why do people do this? Probably two main reasons. Pure opportunism, it is cheaper. $252 a year starts to make sense even on the books. And then the principle. Both end up in the same place. Why should we buy a product a fifth more expensive just because the parasite needs another nickel for its social Ponzi and similar bottomless socialist holes... ? Counter-economics is not just theory. It is a practical defense against redistribution. The tax serf sees the price-with-tax as the only truth. Everyone else sees two prices. The market one and the state one. Then they pick...