Sales to customers in the European Union
This page is intended for paying customers based inside the EU.
VAT-registered businesses
If you provide us with a VAT registration number we won't charge any tax on sales to you. However, you may be liable to pay taxes to your country. Please read how we handle business-to-business EU sales and ensure you provide the relevant details before making any payments.
You will be invoiced as a private individual if you don't provide a valid VAT registration number.
VAT charges for private individuals
Loco is a 'digital service', and EU regulations require that we charge VAT in your country, not in the UK where we're based.
Based on your location, we calculate the VAT chargeable on your subscription and pay it back to your country at the end of each quarter. If you think the wrong tax has been calculated for your country please let us know as soon as possible.
Your location
It's very important that we know what country you're normally based in. We're based in the UK, but we pay VAT charges to your country, not ours. This is the law regarding taxable place of supply and we face fines if we get your location wrong.
Before you subscribe we will simply ask you what country you're based in. This will determine that you pay in Euros and also calculate the correct rate of tax. If you're logging in from a different country you may not be able to proceed with payment until we can verify your usual location.
If we establish at a later date that we've charged you the wrong tax (or charged it in the wrong country) we may need to cancel and refund your plan. We will get in touch with you first if this happens.
Our records
We respect your privacy and don't want to collect unnecessary information about you. However, the law says we have to collect (and store for ten years) multiple pieces of non-contradictory evidence of your location. To achieve this we record your IP address, billing information and the country in which you claim to reside.
We'd really rather not bother you with this, but if these bits of information don't match up, we may have to contact you to correct our records. It's perfectly reasonable to us that a French citizen could be on holiday in Italy using their Swiss partner's credit card. Unfortunately this is not the view of the tax authorities.
Rest of Europe
If you're in a European country that's outside the EU VAT area, you may still see prices in Euros. We thought you'd prefer to see Euros over US Dollars, but if you'd prefer to pay the dollar price let us know before you upgrade and we'll switch your account currency.
Tax exemptions and special rates
If you've been charged VAT, but are exempt for some reason, please contact us to resolve the matter.
We calculate VAT charges based purely on your country, but we know that some regions have special rates that differ from the rest of their country. We can't identify these cases until after you've paid, so you may see that invoices are adjusted after payment.
Universal pricing
Universal pricing is ending on 01 April 2023. Please read the announcement.
Our Euro prices are subject to ten different rates of tax, so when Loco first launched (in 2015) we operated universal pricing across the EU for all our Euro subscription plans. This meant that every customer in the EU paid the same total price for the same product.
Invoices to EU citizens prior to April 2023 will show prices with inclusive taxes. For example: An invoice for €6,95 to a customer in Luxembourg would show €1,01 included as VAT, but a customer in Hungary would have €1,48 included. Both would have paid €6,95 regardless. This model ceases to apply from 01 April 2023, but historical invoices will still show inclusive tax charges when no VAT registration number was given.