The bill is not the risk

That is the entire stack. The static site is hosted on Vercel; DNS and the tunnel that exposes the PrintDrop hub run on Cloudflare's free tier; the repository, the comment system, and the notification service are free; the fonts are self-hosted; search-engine plumbing costs nothing. The one usage-billed line is the Anthropic API behind PrintDrop's generation feature: small, and it scales with use rather than with time. The lines are deliberately not summed into one figure, because they arrive in three currencies and this journal has already written about what silent currency conversion does to a number. Call it on the order of €30 a month, €350–400 a year.

The first question, whether income or an entity is needed to keep these systems running, has a checkable answer: no vendor in the stack requires either. Proton's terms ask only that a business-plan customer represents they are acting as a business or organization; no registration is verified. Render's terms require someone who can form a binding contract, minimum age sixteen. A private person can lawfully pay this entire bill forever.

Vercel's free Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial, personal use, and the fair-use guidelines are unusually specific about what commercial means: any method of requesting payment from visitors, advertising a product or service, and, in a highlighted note, asking for donations. The paid tier is $20 per user per month. This site does not ask anyone for money today, and there is no payment rail anywhere in its codebase, but the moment one appears, a donate button included, the hosting plan has to be the paid one first. Which plan the site sits on is a dashboard fact, not a repository fact, and checking it is now on the list.

perl.com, one of the oldest names in open source, was hijacked in January 2021 because the domain had sat under one person's personal registration since the early 1990s; the project's own post-mortem notes that the domain's admin contact email was on the hijacked domain itself, so "when there's a problem, the communication channels are also borked." And in October 2024, mid-dispute, Matt Mullenweg confirmed that wordpress.org, which a whole ecosystem had assumed belonged to the WordPress Foundation, "is owned by me personally." Personal ownership of a project's neutral-looking infrastructure is invisible right up until the moment it is the whole story.

Every Moduloa system, domain, registrar account, mail organization, hosting dashboards, is currently owned and paid for by one private person. That is the configuration both failures above share, and it is why fiscal hosts like Software Freedom Conservancy exist: their core service is holding a project's assets in an entity instead of in individuals' names. One detail sharpens it here: Proton's terms state plainly that, due to encryption, the company cannot recover the account of anyone who loses their credentials. The €30 is not the vulnerability. The single point of ownership is.

An AS that exists to own a €30-a-month bill costs more per year than the bill it would own. That is not an argument against forming one: it is the honest price of the ownership problem in the previous section, and it is why the trigger for forming it should be something more than the subscriptions. On the bank-account question specifically: the answer arrives bundled. An AS's share capital must be confirmed on deposit, in practice via a bank account opened for the founding, so the company account, and with it a card that pays Proton and Render through the company, is not an extra project. It is a side effect of founding.

Skatteetaten's boundary between hobby and business is four cumulative criteria: the activity is suited to run a surplus over time (judged over roughly five to eight years), has some duration, some regular scope, and runs for one's own account and risk. There is no money floor. Skatteetaten calls out the misconception directly: the famous 50,000 kr is only the threshold for VAT registration (140,000 kr for charitable organizations), and has nothing to do with whether an activity is a business. A print service that charges regularly and is priced to yield a surplus is næringsvirksomhet at a few hundred kroner a month just as surely as at fifty thousand. Today this is a dormant question: PrintDrop runs, and there is no payment rail anywhere in its codebase, but the day the first krone is charged, the classification arrives with it, at any amount.

Three real jobs. It would own the assets, domain, registrar account, mail organization, which is the neutrality fix from the ownership section. It would take liability off the founder: aksjeloven § 1-2 says shareholders are not liable to creditors for the company's obligations, which starts to matter the moment a heated machine runs unattended in someone else's home, with the standard caveats that personal negligence, board liability, and guarantees pierce it, and that insurance matters more than entity form for physical harm. And it would be the thing that lawfully receives the first paid order.

The tax machinery that makes holding structures attractive, fritaksmetoden, under which a company pays effective 0.66% on dividends from subsidiaries and nothing on share gains, is worth exactly nothing until a subsidiary has profits or exit value. Every additional AS costs 30,000 kr in capital, 6,825 kr in fees, and its own annual filing cycle. And the projects on the index are pages, not legal entities; nothing about them requires separate companies to sit under a parent. The structure that matches this stage is one company, Moduloa, hosting every shelf. A holding stack is a later optimization, purchased when there is value to move, not before.

Waiting is cheap but not free: aksjeloven § 2-5 lets a new company absorb its founding costs, but the subscriptions already paid personally have no statutory route into it, and the ownership risk runs until the transfer happens. Three events would each end the waiting on their own: the first krone charged through any project; the first machine placed in a stranger's home; the first person other than the founder whose work depends on these systems. This note prices the options. Field notes are research, not decisions: the decision stays with the founder, on the record, when it is made.

Six limits. DNB's business-account prices could not be verified, its price pages served bot-protection stubs, so the banking range rests on two providers, not three. Ko-fi's 0–5% is read from its own pricing page's title; the page refused automated fetching, so the split by product is unverified here. The claim that an ENK may run on a personal bank account rests on the legal-identity principle and secondary accounting sources, not on a fetched Skatteetaten page, and many banks' consumer terms prohibit it regardless. Which Vercel plan this site sits on is stated nowhere in the repository and was not checked; the fair-use analysis above is the rule, not an audit. Every fee and threshold is a 2026 figure from instruments that are amended every January: the gebyrforskrift changed on 1 January 2026 and will change again. And nothing here is legal or tax advice; it is sourced research by the person who has to make the decision anyway.

Every Norwegian fee, threshold, and statute above was fetched from Lovdata, Brønnøysundregistrene, or Skatteetaten in August 2026 and adversarially re-checked against the primary text before publication; vendor terms and platform fees come from the vendors' own published pages. Where a source could not be reached or contradicts itself, the text says so.

Lovdata: forskrift om gebyr til Brønnøysundregistrene (2026 rates, §§ 5 and 5a) ·Brønnøysundregistrene: fees for registration ·Aksjeloven § 3-1: minimum share capital ·Aksjeloven § 2-5: founding costs ·Aksjeloven § 1-2: limited liability ·Foretaksregisterloven § 2-1: who must register ·Lovdata: audit-exemption thresholds ·Brønnøysundregistrene: late-filing penalty ·Brønnøysundregistrene: pay the share capital ·Skatteetaten: er jeg næringsdrivende? ·Skatteetaten: MVA registration thresholds ·Skatteetaten: fritaksmetoden ·Altinn: aksjekapital as working equity ·Fiken: priser ·Conta: priser ·Folio: priser ·SpareBank 1 Østlandet: prisliste bedrift ·Vercel: fair use guidelines (commercial usage) ·Vercel: Hobby plan ·Proton: terms of service ·Render: terms of service ·GitHub Docs: about GitHub Sponsors ·Open Collective: pricing ·Open Source Collective: fees ·Liberapay: FAQ ·Patreon: pricing ·Ko-fi: pricing ·perl.com: the hijacking of perl.com ·Slashdot: "WordPress.org just belongs to me" (reporting The Verge's interview) ·Software Freedom Conservancy: fiscal sponsorship services ·Daniel Stenberg: curl reaches $100K raised ·SourceHut: 2022 financial report ·SQLite: the SQLite Consortium ·Drew DeVault: a few ways to make money in FOSS