He spent €9,654 and 152 days to found a company he still can't bill from
Carmine Paolino added up every receipt from starting a UG & Co. KG in Germany. The notary alone read his own paperwork aloud back to him, on the clock.
The line that stings is the share capital: €2,000 frozen in an account because, as the founder explains, that money is the company's risk, not his. The notary, court, register, tax, and legal fees pile on from there.
Then German founders and accountants showed up in the thread and turned the complaint on its head: he picked the most baroque structure on the menu, they said, when a plain UG takes weeks and a few hundred euros.
A founder added up every euro it took to not send an invoice
Carmine Paolino did the thing few founders bother to do: he itemized the bill. To stand up PlentyLabs UG & Co. KG — a small limited-liability UG owning a partnership, a structure picked to get liability protection without locking €25,000 into a GmbH's reserves — he logged €1,575.24 in notary fees, €300 court advance, €260 register fees, €630 tax registration, €4,462.50 legal fees, €426.97 for accounting software, and €2,000 of share capital frozen in an account. Total: €9,654.71.
The timeline ran 152 days, from late January to late June. And the punchline he leads with: after all of it, he still can't send a single invoice, because the VAT ID needed to bill arrives by postal mail weeks after the paperwork clears. He also can't simply leave: walking out of Germany would trigger a six-figure exit tax on unrealized gains from his first company, Freshflow.
German founders show up to argue he did it to himself
The author waded into his own thread, and the most cutting replies came from people who have run the gauntlet. A founder who has built companies on three continents framed the bureaucracy as a feature, not a bug.
"Germany wasn't designed for randos to start companies… All the bureaucracy is a filter, and what it filters out is change itself. You were never supposed to incorporate a company. You were supposed to get a job at Volkswagen." — a founder who has run businesses on three continents
The German contingent pushed back on the math. A developer who recently incorporated the simple way reported a very different bill.
"idk I founded a UG within a few weeks recently. Yeh it costs me maybe a thousand or so in notary fees but that's it." — a software engineer at Timescale
Others noted that half the locked capital myth is just that — a myth — and that the structure, not the country, is what bled time.
"You can start a GmbH with exactly half of it (12.500€). And the money does NOT need to stay locked on the bank account. You can spend it for company purposes (but NOT for founder wages)." — a commenter correcting the share-capital claim
The author conceded the structure was costly, confirming in the thread that converting Freshflow into a GmbH had been expensive too. One commenter who traced the schedule found that the exotic UG & Co. KG cost money but not the bulk of the calendar.
"most of the time is actually spent with the lawyer and tax advisor, not the bureaucracy itself." — a commenter who walked the 17-day notary-to-registration timeline
What the fight exposes is a split the EU keeps tripping over: the same legal apparatus that German insiders defend as orderly is the one that makes a Pole, a Dutchman, or a Brit describe incorporation as a 30-minute web form. An "EU Inc." proposal floated in the comments as the fix — promptly met with the prediction that the German notary lobby would gut it.
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