Italy · Agentic SaaS development

SaaS Development for Italy: Billing, SdI and Agentic Builds

The awkward part of selling a subscription product in Italy is billing, not the interface. Since 2019, invoices between parties resident or established in Italy go only through the Sistema di Interscambio, so a PDF from your payment provider does not cover it. Most online payments by Italian consumers are made by card or e-payment solution, the checkout has to handle strong customer authentication, and where Italian VAT applies the standard rate is 22%.

Curiosive is a software studio in Ankara, Türkiye, and builds SaaS with AI coding agents under senior engineer review. Engineers design the multi-tenant data model, tenant isolation, plan and entitlement logic and idempotent billing webhooks. Agents produce the CRUD screens, admin views, migrations and test suites around that core, and nothing merges until an engineer has read the diff. Ankara is one or two hours ahead of Italy depending on the season.

Start a partnership From $2,000 per month

24: published portfolio projects
5+: years building for production
12: countries the work runs in
100%: of code read by a senior engineer
1 day: to hear back, from the engineer

VAT on SaaS subscriptions sold to customers in Italy

Italy's standard VAT rate is 22%, with reduced rates of 5% and 10% and a super-reduced rate of 4%. For business customers in another EU country, the usual rule is the reverse charge: you do not charge VAT and the customer pays it at its own country's rate, although there are several important exceptions. Telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic (TBE) services sold to consumers are taxed in the customer's country, with a EUR 10,000 threshold below which they may be taxed in the seller's own EU country, and the One Stop Shop lets a seller declare that VAT through one EU registration. Whether your product counts as an electronic service is worth confirming with an accountant. We store customer type, country and VAT number on each subscription and the applied rate on each invoice.

SdI e-invoicing for B2B SaaS billing in Italy

For invoices issued from 1 January 2019, supplies between parties resident or established in Italy must be invoiced only as electronic invoices through the SdI. Flat-rate (forfettario) taxpayers lost their exemption from 1 July 2022 if prior-year revenue or fees exceeded €25,000, and from 1 January 2024 for everyone else. Normattiva shows that wording in force until 31 December 2026; from 1 January 2027 the rules move into the new VAT Consolidated Act, Legislative Decree 10/2026. Under the EU's VAT in the Digital Age directive, from 1 July 2030 invoices are to be issued electronically to the European standard, though Member States may allow other standards for domestic supplies, and reverse-charge invoices are due within 10 days of the chargeable event. An Italian SaaS company billing Italian customers needs invoices as structured records from the first release, so we model them as their own table, separate from payment events.

Cards, e-payment solutions and strong customer authentication in Italy

In the ECB's SPACE 2024 data for Italy, cards made up 51% of consumers' online payments by number and e-payment solutions 28%, while instant payments (5%) and credit transfers (3%) were marginal. The PSD2 rules on strong customer authentication let providers skip it for remote payments of up to EUR 30, but only while the cumulative total since the last authentication stays within EUR 100 or five consecutive transactions, so checkout plans for authentication at signup and on later charges. PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation were listed as close to adoption on 20 September 2026 and still need formal adoption. Subscription status follows the payment provider's events, and a redelivered webhook changes nothing. The closest example is PicKey (pickey.ai), a password manager with Stripe subscription billing.

Accessibility fines and AgID enforcement for services in Italy

The European Accessibility Act applies to specific consumer services provided after 28 June 2025, among them e-commerce, consumer banking, e-books and dedicated software. A B2B tool may fall outside it, and microenterprises (fewer than 10 people and annual turnover or balance sheet total of at most EUR 2 million) are exempt from the service requirements. For services in scope, Italy's Legislative Decree 82/2022 sets fines of €5,000 to €40,000 for breaching the accessibility obligations, and €2,500 to €30,000 for ignoring the supervisory authority's measures or failing to cooperate. Private providers with average turnover above €500 million over three years who ignore a formal AgID warning face a sanction of up to 5% of turnover. For an in-scope product, an engineer checks keyboard paths and screen reader output on every release, and fixes go back to agents as scoped tasks.

Engineers decide how tenants are separated in PostgreSQL and how a plan maps to what a customer can use. Agents then write the screens, admin views and the tests that try to read across tenants. For Italian users, SPID is a login option: private companies can join as service providers, with fees AgID publishes. The EU Data Act has applied since 12 September 2025 to data processing services, SaaS included. Switching terms must be in a written contract with a notice period of no more than two months and a transitional period of no more than 30 calendar days, and from 12 January 2027 no switching charges are allowed. Services mostly custom-built for one customer are partly exempt, and the provider must say which obligations do not apply before the contract is concluded. Related work includes Reveal Software (reveal.software), built on Hono, Drizzle ORM and PostgreSQL.

Proof

Published project examples

Reveal Software

Release Coach AI

Inspire Film

Poppin

Zing Coach

ChurchBee

AI-accelerated development

from$2,000

per month

Senior engineers building your product with AI coding agents: web, mobile, SaaS or browser extension, reviewed before anything ships.

Web, mobile, SaaS and browser extensions
AI-assisted delivery under senior engineer review
Scope and capacity agreed in writing, renews monthly

AI-accelerated development, billed monthly. We confirm scope, capacity and start date in writing before checkout.

Questions

The things people ask before starting.

What VAT rate applies to SaaS subscriptions sold to consumers in Italy?

Italy's standard rate is 22%, and TBE services sold to consumers are generally taxed in the customer's country, subject to the EUR 10,000 threshold. Sales to businesses in other EU countries usually fall under the reverse charge instead, with the customer accounting for the VAT. The One Stop Shop covers cross-border consumer sales through one registration.

Do SaaS invoices to Italian businesses have to go through the SdI?

Yes, if both you and the customer are resident or established in Italy. Since 2019 those invoices must be electronic and sent through the Sistema di Interscambio, and since 1 January 2024 the flat-rate exemption no longer applies to anyone, so billing has to produce structured invoice data.

Can users in Italy log in to a SaaS product with SPID?

Yes, private companies can make their online services accessible through SPID as service providers, and AgID publishes the authentication fees for private providers. SPID was used 1,220,153,029 times in 2025, so it is worth weighing early for products aimed at Italian users.

How much does it cost to build a SaaS product for the Italian market?

Work runs as AI-accelerated development, starting from $2,000 per month, with scope agreed in writing. Neither figure is a quote, since both are published US dollar starting points, and scope and budget are fixed in writing once a discovery call is done.

Solutions

Locations

What happens after you write to us.

01
You describe the product
One paragraph on what you are building, roughly when you need it, and who it is for. No brief, no form with fifteen fields.
02
You get a reply within a day
From the engineer who would do the work, not a sales team. If we are not the right fit we say so, and where possible we point you somewhere better.
03
You get a scoped plan
Scope, price and timeline in writing before anything is committed. You decide with the numbers in front of you.

No long contract to begin, no lock-in to our tooling, and the code is yours from the first commit.

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Contact

Looking for an engineering partner for the long haul?

A short note about the product, the timeline and who it is for is enough to start. You will hear back from the engineer who would do the work, not a sales team.

hello@curiosive.com See what we have shipped

Ankara / Türkiye · Working across European and US time zones

SaaS Development for Italy: Billing, SdI and Agentic Builds

VAT on SaaS subscriptions sold to customers in Italy

SdI e-invoicing for B2B SaaS billing in Italy

Cards, e-payment solutions and strong customer authentication in Italy

Accessibility fines and AgID enforcement for services in Italy