Stripe goes live tomorrow. We're deliberately saying no to almost everyone.

This week we decided to switch on Stripe payments for exactly one market: Spain. Non-Spanish buyers get blocked at checkout and sent to a waitlist page instead. The rule we'd been treating as gating the entire launch — VIES, the EU registration needed for cross-border VAT reverse charge — turns out to only apply to selling across borders, not to selling inside Spain.

The gate we misread

Back in May we stripped Spanish out of the whole ecosystem — every landing page, every dashboard, every satellite app — and went English-only, on the assumption our first real customers would come from North Europe. The plan since then had Stripe going live only once we'd secured a VIES-listed tax registration, the thing that lets a Spanish company sell to a company in another EU country without charging VAT twice. That ruling was correct for the market it assumed. It just never applied to the market we're actually launching into first.

VIES governs one specific transaction shape: a Spanish company invoicing a company in a different EU member state, applying the reverse charge instead of Spanish IVA. A Spanish company selling to another Spanish company needs none of that — it's 21% IVA repercutido, reported on the standard quarterly filing, full stop. We'd been reading a rule written for cross-border sales as if it blocked all sales, and it took a second look at the actual regulation to see the gap.

Why checkout says no to almost everyone

So the launch proceeds, but narrower than "open for business." Checkout now requires a Spanish tax ID and refuses anything else. A company outside Spain doesn't get charged the wrong VAT rate and then have it unwound later — it gets a waitlist page. That's the fiscal safety net: it makes the mistake we're avoiding structurally impossible to make by accident, rather than trusting a form field nobody double-checks.

The safest way to sell into a market you haven't cleared yet is to refuse the sale at the door, not to hope nobody from outside Spain ever tries to pay.

What we reversed, and what we didn't

Three standing positions moved this week. English-only is reversed — Spanish is coming back across every landing, Hub's four acts, miniterms, InvoiceUp, politeno, MiniReplies, and transactional email. North-Europe-first is reversed for this phase — Spain is now the only launch market, and North Europe returns once the VIES registration lands. And "Stripe waits for VIES" is narrowed, not dropped: that rule now applies specifically to cross-border sales, which is exactly the expansion the registration still gates.

Everything else holds. The launch stays business-to-business only, same as the scope we locked the week before. Pricing is unchanged — the same free, 99€, 249€, and 499€ tiers we locked in May. VeriFactu, Spain's e-invoicing mandate, still lands January 2027 regardless of when Stripe goes live. And every string we translate into Spanish goes through the same public-claims review as anything we publish in English — restoring a language doesn't relax what we're willing to assert in it.

The debt this launch takes on

We're not pretending this is free. Full Spanish coverage across the ecosystem is weeks of work, not days, so the launch ships ahead of the translation finishing — we're sequencing the parts a buyer actually touches first: landing page, pricing, checkout, the invoice email. The authenticated dashboards catch up after. And the 99€ monthly price was modeled against North-European willingness to pay; selling into a smaller domestic market at the same price is a different bet, one we don't have funnel data on yet. We'd rather launch narrow and honest about what's unproven than wait for a translation pass to finish before taking the first real payment.