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Ukraine · Agentic SaaS development

SaaS Development for Founders Selling in Ukraine

An easy mistake for a subscription product sold by a company registered abroad is to assume Ukrainian VAT is someone else's problem. Under Tax Code Article 208-1, a non-resident selling electronic services to individuals in Ukraine must apply to register for VAT by 31 March once its sales of such services in the previous calendar year exceed the equivalent of 1,000,000 hryvnias. Supplying without registering is fined 30 minimum wages. Billing data that cannot show sales by customer type and country hides that threshold.

Curiosive builds SaaS products from Ankara, Türkiye, with AI coding agents doing the volume and senior engineers reviewing every change. Engineers design the multi-tenant data model, tenant isolation, plan and entitlement logic and the billing webhooks; agents produce the CRUD screens, admin views, migrations and test suites around them. Working days line up closely too, since Ukraine shares Ankara's clock in summer and sits an hour behind it in winter.

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VAT on SaaS and electronic services sold in Ukraine

Article 14.1.56-5 defines electronic services to include services supplied through apps, software and updates, cloud services and online advertising, so a hosted subscription sold to individuals should be planned as inside the Article 208-1 regime. Individuals here include sole proprietors not registered for VAT. Once registered, a non-resident supplier charges 20% VAT calculated in euros or US dollars and files quarterly simplified declarations through the special non-resident portal within 40 calendar days after each quarter ends. A Ukrainian company has a different trigger: it must register once taxable sales over the last 12 months exceed 1,000,000 hryvnias, counting sales made through apps, unless it pays the single tax in groups 1 to 3 (Article 181.1). Either way, revenue needs tracking against the relevant threshold from the first paying customer.

B2B billing in Ukraine: tax invoices and royalty withholding

If your company is a Ukrainian VAT payer, every tax invoice must be issued electronically, signed with a qualified electronic signature or an advanced signature based on a qualified certificate, and registered in the Unified Register of Tax Invoices (Article 201). Registration can be suspended under Cabinet of Ministers rules, so the billing system should track each invoice's registration status rather than assume it. Selling to Ukrainian businesses from abroad brings another rule. Ukrainian payers withhold 15% tax on royalties paid to non-residents unless an applicable double tax treaty provides otherwise (Article 141.4.2). Under Article 14.1.225, payments for end-user use of a computer program are not royalties when use is limited to the program's function and copying is limited to the copies that use requires. Licence wording therefore matters, and it is worth confirming it with an accountant before the first large contract.

Payments in Ukraine: instant credit transfers and subscriptions

Since December 2024, the National Bank of Ukraine's System of Electronic Payments SEP-4.1 has supported 24/7 instant credit transfers that complete within 10 seconds and can be started with QR codes or deeplinks. Since August 2025, the Law 'On Payment Services' requires every payment service provider that offers credit transfers to offer instant ones through the same remote channels. For a subscription product with business customers, a QR code or deeplink on the invoice can sit alongside card payment, and it raises the bar on reconciliation: money that arrives in seconds should switch the plan on in seconds. Engineers write the payment handlers so that a repeated notification changes nothing the second time, with the provider's record as the only truth about who has paid. Each subscription state change, from trial to cancellation, gets its own test, and every payment path is reviewed by a senior engineer.

Selling a SaaS product from Ukraine to customers in the EU

EU procurement teams ask where personal data goes. The European Commission has no adequacy decision for Ukraine: it was not on the Commission's list when checked on 5 October 2026, so personal data sent there from the EU cannot rely on adequacy. An EU customer whose data goes there therefore needs another transfer tool. The Standard Contractual Clauses in Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2021/914 count as appropriate safeguards for transfers to an importer whose processing is not subject to the GDPR. Under Clause 14, both parties warrant they have no reason to believe the destination country's laws and practices prevent the importer from complying. For the architecture, that brings two decisions forward: where customer data is hosted, and who can reach it from where. Both are cheaper to settle in the data model than in a security questionnaire.

Multi-tenant SaaS architecture built with coding agents

Engineers design the tenant model before any screens exist: which tables carry a tenant key, how every query is scoped and how plans map to entitlements. For a product sold to Ukrainian customers, that model also records whether each customer is an individual, a sole proprietor or a VAT-registered business, and which currency each charge was made in, because the VAT rules above turn on those details. Coding agents such as Claude Code and Cursor then build the volume around it, from CRUD screens and admin views to migrations and test suites, and a senior engineer reads each diff before it merges. Reveal Software (reveal.software), personal video onboarding for SaaS products, runs on Hono, Drizzle ORM and PostgreSQL. PicKey (pickey.ai) is a visual password manager with subscription billing on Stripe, and Inspire Film (inspire.film) handles per-title entitlement for a virtual cinema.

Proof

Published project examples

Reveal Software

Reveal Software

Release Coach AI

Release Coach AI

Inspire Film

Inspire Film

Poppin

Poppin

Zing Coach

Zing Coach

ChurchBee

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.

Do foreign SaaS companies have to register for VAT in Ukraine?

Yes, once sales to individuals pass the threshold. A non-resident selling electronic services to individuals in Ukraine must apply to register by 31 March after a calendar year in which those sales exceeded the equivalent of 1,000,000 hryvnias, then charge 20% VAT and file quarterly simplified declarations.

Is a SaaS subscription treated as a royalty for withholding tax in Ukraine?

Not automatically. Article 14.1.225 says payments for end-user use of a computer program are not royalties when use is limited to the program's function and copying to what that use requires. Where a payment is a royalty, Ukrainian payers withhold 15% unless a double tax treaty provides otherwise, so licence wording deserves attention.

What does SaaS development for the Ukrainian market cost per month?

The starting point is $2,000 a month, paid in US dollars, for AI-accelerated development whose scope and capacity are set out in writing once the discovery call is done. Ukrainian VAT reporting and instant transfer handling belong in that first scope discussion, and the code belongs to you from the first commit.

Can EU customers use a SaaS product run from Ukraine?

Yes, but not on the basis of adequacy. The European Commission had no adequacy decision for Ukraine when checked on 5 October 2026, so EU customers whose personal data reaches Ukraine need another transfer tool, such as the Standard Contractual Clauses of Decision (EU) 2021/914.

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How it starts

What happens after you write to us.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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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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.

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Ankara / Türkiye · Working across European and US time zones