Sales tax now charged for Canadian customers

Digital Ocean, perhaps you can take this answer here to your guys wearing suites, who’s never written a line of code. Here it goes: Your main persona customer demographic is your sole developer, small/size agency, and the nerd spinning up servers to test his apps. You have grown and you’ve also helped your main customers mentioned above grow as well. So now you are being introduced to other customers such as corporate clients who’s developers are on the personas mentioned above.

You get it right? Well, guess what? I belong to that demographic as well. Over years I’ve been setting up servers for my clients whom some are individual entrepreneurs to small businesses to medium size corporations. I have done this successfully because DO is amazing.

Now, you are charging an additional tax. What does this mean? In my case, my paypal account is Canadian and It means that, your true price of a droplet is $10 + 7% HST. It also means that id my server costs me $100, I will pay $107.

Great so now since I know AWS very well and been launching servers with them over the years, I can now compare AWS with DO+HST

This also means that you will have a lot of losses. Because of your guys dressed in suites with Macroeconomic backgrounds took some decisions without consulting your hard working Marketing Team who worked so hard to build all your campaigns, articles, channels etc. All that work just pooof… blown away. I suggest that you revise your decision and only the people who made Digital Ocean great, only those grinders, who started DO from the ground up, only those people will understand. Because they know how hard it is to build a great company from startup to what you have now.

So, either you change your model, or you will have to face the consequences of being compared to other competitors such as Google Cloud Platform, and AWS (you may think, they are not really competitors) If you think like that, you will not be competing at all.

I hope this helps you.

Yes! We have opened up a subsidiary office in Canada. For more information regarding Canadian sales taxes, please see our Tax FAQ.

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