The post is a first-person account of founding a company in Germany and running into a long chain of delays, fees, and manual steps. The founder says he spent €9,600 over 152 days and still could not send invoices because the company was not fully ready and the VAT number had not arrived. He frames the core problem as Germany demanding too much upfront capital and too much ceremony just to let a small software business operate with limited liability.
Most of the useful pushback landed on one point: this was not a plain vanilla German company formation. The founder chose a
UG & Co.
KG, which is a nested two-entity structure usually used for tax or ownership optimization. Commenters with German operating experience said that a simple UG or
GmbH is much more standard, cheaper, and faster to set up, and that the article mixes true complaints about Germany with self-inflicted complexity. Several also noted that some of the quoted “founding costs” were really working capital or normal operating expenses, not money lost to the state.
That did not turn into a defense of the German system. Even people who thought the author chose the wrong structure still described Germany as archaic, notary-heavy, non-digital, and painfully sequential. The strongest consensus was that Germany’s real problem is not just the headline 25,000 euro GmbH capital number. It is the whole package around it: mandatory notaries, slow registry courts, delayed VAT IDs, expensive tax compliance, and a legal culture that still treats a tiny software shop more like a 20th century industrial firm. Many contrasted this with the UK, Netherlands, Estonia, Poland, Portugal, Finland, and parts of the US, where limited-liability entities can be created online for a few hundred euros or dollars and be operational within days.
On the capital question itself, commenters mostly converged on a narrower view than the post. Germany does already have the UG as the low-capital version of a GmbH, but it carries a reputation penalty in some
B2B settings and still inherits most of the same compliance burden. That led people to a more practical critique: if clients care about capitalization, publish the actual capital or assets and let counterparties judge the risk, instead of imposing a single arbitrary threshold that is too high for a spice shop and meaningless for anything genuinely dangerous. Several pointed out that 25,000 euros will not save anyone from a major fraud or insolvency anyway, while still blocking ordinary founders from starting.
The other thread that mattered was tax residency and “just incorporate elsewhere.” A lot of people suggested Estonia, Delaware, or the UK, but the more informed replies said that if management and control stay in Germany, German tax authorities can still treat the company as German. That means you keep the German tax burden and add cross-border complexity on top. The wider takeaway was bleak but clear: Germany is hard both to enter and to leave. Founders mentioned the exit tax on unrealized gains, strict insolvency rules, and costly shutdown processes as proof that the friction is not just at incorporation but across the whole company lifecycle.