Important note: The cost / delay he's talking about isn't registering a company; it's getting a VAT number. I've done both in the UK, and while getting a VAT number is significantly cheaper than 9k EUR and significantly faster than 6 months, it's not nearly as quick or cheap as simply registering the company, which is what many commenters (and even the author in TFA) are comparing it to.

I feel your pain -- I gave up (in Austria). The best thing that happened to me was that it took so long to get incorporated that I had time to talk to people about what happens next (e.g. annual filing, need for accountants even if revenue is still zero, etc.). So I consider the sunk cost a valuable 4,000 Euro learning experience, and I won't try to repeat it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325340#48336339

Europe has lots of issues with companies. It's not just Germany.

And the EU knows, hopefully it will improve the situation: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/03/18/48-hours-and-1...

> “No,” said the lawyer. German company names have to be distinctive, and “Plenty” is a plain English word. Berlin would reject it.

Good.

> And no, I could not just leave instead. My first company, Freshflow, is valuable enough that walking out of Germany would trigger a massive six-figure exit tax

Something is wrong here if you will be liable for at least a hundred grand of exit but balk over 25k to start a new company.

The €25k working capital requirement seems a little prescriptive to me (in the US there is nothing like that for non-finance industries, although some businesses need bonds which pay clients/customers if you fail to perform), but it's also the case that most businesses are going to need more than 25k in working capital once they're beyond the startup phase, and outside of tech you typically have working capital requirements that grow with increasing revenue, meaning your accounting profits can be growing but you can still run out of cash since you spend it before you can collect it.

I gave up on trying to set up an company in Germany. Founding is the 1st side of the coin, but the other side of the coin are the complexities of closing your company (which takes at least a year as well) and exit tax (you might get taxed 6-7 figures when moving abroad even if you don't really make reasonable money).

The biggest issue is to find a tax consultant for your GmbH/UG, especially when you have low revenue (below 1M).

I recently helped my friend (3rd country national) to open a new business in Czech Republic.

It took 3 months from registration to sending her first invoice. The longest wait was on the bank account: a very few places are willing to open company account if you don't have an EU residency. Without the bank account, she couldn't deposit founding capital (základní kapitál) which is required to complete the registration. It's even funnier cause the minimum amount to deposit is 1 CZK (5 cents).

Total cost to start business was under $8,000. The most expensive were legal services: writing down all contracts and customer agreements was around ~$5,000.

I feel like this is such an untapped market for getting digitilized. I was thinking to actually sit and vibe code it at some point but can't imagine doing this alone.

The mantra has always been to only create the company after sending the first invoice.

Edit: oh it's setup like this to cheat on taxes.