Why your business structure matters more than your stack (mine is a Bulgarian EOOD)

Founders will benchmark databases for a week and then pick the legal structure their money flows through in one afternoon, usually by copying whatever their last employer or favorite YouTuber had. I did a version of this too. It is backwards: your stack you can migrate in a weekend, your business structure decides how much of every euro you keep, what happens if something goes wrong, and how annoying your accounting is every single month, and unwinding a bad choice involves lawyers, not a script.

What a structure actually decides

Three things, mostly. How profit reaches you: as salary, dividends, or freelance income, each taxed differently, and the spread between countries is enormous. Where the liability stops: a proper limited company means a failed product or an unlucky lawsuit hits the company, not your apartment. Freelancing as a natural person means there is no wall at all. How much friction you carry: VAT registrations, invoicing rules, accounting cadence, banking. Friction is a tax too, you just pay it in evenings instead of euros.

My setup, with real numbers

I am Bulgarian, and I run PostFast and my other projects through a Bulgarian EOOD, which is the local single-owner limited company. The headline math is simple and, unusually for headline math, true: 10 percent corporate tax on profit, then 5 percent withholding when I pay myself dividends. Roughly 14.5 percent combined before social contributions, on rates that just survived a government collapse and a budget fight without changing. Since January 2026 Bulgaria is also in the eurozone, so the company banks in euro on SEPA rails and my EU clients pay me like locals.

The parts nobody puts in the pitch: the company files monthly through an accountant (mine costs less than a hosting bill, but it is a real recurring cost), corporate records are in Bulgarian, and the 10 percent only makes sense inside a structure that fits where you actually live. That last clause carries a lot of weight.

I ended up turning that experience into a project of its own: BulgariaHQ, where we help foreigners figure out whether a Bulgarian company fits them, and set one up properly if it does. We wrote up what running an EOOD actually looks like month to month there, including the unglamorous parts.

The part everyone skips: residency beats incorporation

The internet is full of "incorporate in X, pay Y percent" content that quietly ignores tax residency. Where the company is registered matters less than where you personally live and where the company is actually managed from. A German resident running a Bulgarian company from Berlin has not discovered a loophole, they have discovered future correspondence with the Finanzamt. The structure works when the substance is real: you live there, or you relocate, or your setup is properly advised on both ends. This is exactly the kind of question where a few hundred euros of professional advice is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

If Bulgaria is on your shortlist, price the real thing first: the official state fees for forming an EOOD are around 35 euros total, and everything above that in a formation package is service, some of it worth paying for and some of it padding. We decoded what formation actually costs against the official state tariff on BulgariaHQ, because it is the write-up I wish had existed when I first dealt with any of this.

The boring conclusion

Pick your structure the way you pick a database: based on your actual workload, with real numbers, expecting to live with it for years. If you are EU-based, sell across borders, and want low, stable, boring taxes, a Bulgarian EOOD deserves a spot on the shortlist. If your life is anchored somewhere with aggressive tax authorities and you have no intention of moving, it probably does not, and anyone who tells you otherwise without asking where you live is selling a package, not advice.

Either way, decide it on purpose. It is the one piece of architecture you cannot refactor on a Friday night.