user41 The challenge is that in order to show the final calculated tax, globally for all customers, we would need to know your location. Because Kagi does not want your information, we defer that to when you are off of kagi.com and on checkout on stripe.com. This is also why we don't use their embedded checkout widget, so that you also are not entering any payment info on our domain.
Nor does Kagi have tax rate data, we have to request that from Stripe, which incurs a small fee to us each time we do. We can cache it of course, but there will be a chance its wrong / different from what Stripe says at final checkout. So, the middle ground we chose for now is to simply indicate that applicable tax for your region will be added.
In any case: We understand the confusion, and we have already planned on implementing showing an approximate tax rate based on GeoIP location, and loading tax rates from Stripe occasionally, with an appropriate disclaimer on accuracy.
Out of curiosity, how it was legal to charge without paying tax? Don't you need to pay tax as a company always?
Not avoiding this question, but a quick answer with the big disclaimer that I am not our "tax guy": My limited understanding is the answer is "it depends" and largely based on how much revenue you are making in individual districts. You may be required to pay tax in some areas of the world before others. It is very common for startups to avoid this completely until they are very big or bought out, but we wanted to take care of it much sooner than later.
(Our other staff may come in and correct me if I've gotten anything horribly wrong 😃 )
