I've looked at GitHub sponsors briefly, but some of the requirements seemed a bit hard to understand. Was it a huge hassle at all for you to setup (speaking as a Canadian)?
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They switched to using Stripe for payments and it deposits the money into your bank account every month without charging any fees.
You need to add a USD and/or CAD savings account to Stripe using Canadian branch information for the bank (not US). It works with RBC without setup.
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GitHub Sponsors only charges people in USD so people end up paying 2.5% or so conversion fees to their credit card company for other currencies.
If you only add a CAD account, you'll pay about the same amount for conversion from USD. You can add a Canadian USD account though.
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I got conflicting information from Stripe and RBC support and I was trying to use the RBC USD branch information which is what I use to withdraw USD from PayPal. Stripe needs the Canadian branch information and also note it only wants 7 digit number as the bank account number.
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I entered it with the 06222- prefix and they accepted that but it was causing payments to fail. I switched to trying US branch information (like PayPal) and that wasn't working. Ended up just needing to use Canadian branch (even for USD) and entering number the way they expect.
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They don't validate that you enter it in the right format because it's a US-centric company and they don't seem to understand how Canada works. It does work properly and painlessly if you enter the information the way they want, at least with RBC. Can't speak to other banks.
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Yeah, not with RBC. All of that and the IRS forms they want to be filled out honestly just makes anxious. Perhaps someday, but for now I'll stick with PayPal.
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W8-BEN is easy to deal with as a Canadian because we have a tax treaty with the US allowing you to simply put 0% withholding tax with a standard reference to a tax treaty article. It's ridiculous you actually need to cite right part of the tax treaty but you can find it online.
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I've had to fill out several of them at this point because companies treat bug bounties as contract income. Google let me sign a standard statement of no US activities form instead but later I figured out it was pretty easy to deal with the W8-BEN nonsense as a Canadian anyway.
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It could be super painful in other countries because you can end up needing to let IRS take up to 30% withholding tax and then you actually have to file a US tax return to get the money back. As a Canadian, it's just a hassle to know secret password of tax treaty article to cite.
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This is up-to-date information:
michellecornish.com/blog/how-to-fi
You just need to put "business income" as the type of income instead of "royalties" with the same Article VII cited for 0% income and the same explanation that you carried out no US activities as part of getting it.
Also, CRA recognizes that crowdfunding income is not taxable income if you aren't providing a service or product to people so you don't actually need to pay taxes on it if you aren't giving people shirts or something else the CRA could claim has actual tangible value to them.
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taxpage.com/articles-and-t is the general idea. Basically, if you give rewards, you turn it into taxable income. There's ridiculously complex information about it on the CRA site. I talked about it with an accountant and they recommended being really careful not to offer anything.
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Did you have to print it, fill it out and scan it back in, or just fill it out electronically? I never know how to handle signatures on such forms..
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I usually fill these things out in a PDF program, print it out, sign it and scan it. I don't really think it's necessary though. I sometimes just draw a terrible signature with a brush in Krita. I don't really think any of them care and they wouldn't really know the difference.
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