In light of the aforementioned transparency, I want to be as open and upfront to you about this as I possibly can. Unfortunately, taxes are extremely complicated and often a slippery slope. While trying to figure out what my national tax office considers a donation, I ended up with more questions than actual answers. From what I was able to gather, it seems that a donation is only actually a donation tax-wise when nothing is received in return. Technically, we give you something in return, so these subscriptions don't meet the tax criteria for donations. How large charities do this even though some of them give you little welcome gifts and sometimes even a periodic magazine, I have no idea.

So, tax-wise these are not donations, but I can't just accept money without paying any taxes over it. This is why regular VAT is applied over our support packages. The VAT rate in my country (the Netherlands) is 21%. This rate is applied for everyone because the additional administration involved in both applying country specific rates and tax paperwork is simply not feasible for me (it would also require you to enter your personal address information, which I want to prevent at all costs).