Why am I being charged sales tax?

Some US states and cities treat software subscriptions like MapleGather as taxable. Where we’re registered to collect that tax, we add it to your bill as its own line and pass it on to the authority.

The short version

Sales tax is separate from what MapleGather charges for the service. Your $29.00 base fee and your $0.06 per-contact rate are both before tax. If tax applies to you, it’s calculated on that pre-tax amount and shown as its own line — never folded into the price.

Whether it applies depends on the billing address you gave us when you added your payment method. If we aren’t registered to collect tax where you are, there’s no tax line and your total is the same as your subtotal.

How it works

Your billing address decides it

Sales tax on a software subscription is worked out from where the service is used. That’s why we ask for a billing address in the same step as your card — without it we can’t tell what you owe, and we’re not willing to guess.

Your billing address is used only for this. It’s kept separately from your organization’s mailing address, and changing one never changes the other.

What you see on your bill

Your subscription page and each invoice show the same three parts:

Subtotal — your base fee plus any per-contact charges, before tax and after any promo code.
A line for each taxing authority — labelled with the level (State, County, City, or Special district) and the authority’s own name, followed by the amount.
Total — your subtotal plus tax.

You’ll see the amount for each authority, not a rate or a percentage. We don’t set these rates and we don’t store them; we show what the calculation produced.

When there’s no tax line

If no authority applies to your address, or if every one that does works out to zero for your bill, you’ll see no tax line at all — not a zero, not a dash, not a greyed-out row. Your total simply equals your subtotal. Those two situations look identical on your bill, and both mean the same thing for you: nothing extra to pay.

Before you’ve given us a billing address there is a third case, and it doesn’t mean the same thing. A trial organization that hasn’t subscribed yet has told us nothing to work tax out from, so the page shows your bill before tax and says your tax is calculated on your first real invoice. That is not “no tax” and it is not zero — it’s “not known yet”.

The estimate versus the invoice

Before you subscribe, the subscribe page shows an estimate from the address you’ve typed, and labels it as one. Once you’re subscribed, your subscription page shows a projection for your next bill.

Neither is the record. The amounts that count are the ones on your issued invoice, which is why the per-authority breakdown appears in each invoice’s details under Subscription (at /admin/admin-security/subscription) → View all invoices. The formal document and its PDF are hosted by our payment processor and open in a new tab.

If we can’t calculate tax

Occasionally our tax service is unreachable. When that happens we tell you so and keep the figure labelled as your bill before tax — we never present it as a total. If it happens while you’re subscribing, nothing is charged and nothing is created; try again in a moment.

Why it works this way

Quoting a price that turns out to be short is worse than quoting an honest pre-tax figure and saying so. A tax we’re required to collect but didn’t is one we’d still owe, so the product refuses to show you a total it isn’t sure of, and refuses to start a subscription whose tax position it couldn’t confirm.

Showing each authority separately, spelled the way that authority spells it, is what makes the charge auditable — you can take an invoice to your bookkeeper and see exactly who got what.

Edge cases & boundaries

Moving. If your organization relocates, correct your billing address on your subscription page — you’ll need billing permission, and the option appears only once an address is on file (which happens when you subscribe). The change applies to your next invoice. Invoices already issued are never re-taxed, in either direction.
Nonprofit status. Being a nonprofit does not by itself make your subscription tax-exempt, and you can’t turn exemption on yourself. See Nonprofit sales tax exemption.
Registration changes. Tax rules change and so does where we’re registered. A tax line can appear or disappear between billing periods without anything changing on your side.
Outside the US. The country on your billing address is fixed to the United States, because we hold no tax registrations outside the US.
US territories. MapleGather is currently available to organizations with a billing address in the 50 US states or Washington, DC. The state list doesn’t include Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa or the Northern Mariana Islands, so we can’t yet take a subscription from an organization in a territory — you’ll see it stated on the signup page before you start a trial. Please don’t pick a mainland state you aren’t in. Address verification rejects a territory ZIP code paired with a mainland state, so it wouldn’t get you through anyway, and the address you give us is the thing that tells us where we owe tax.
This is not your members’ tax. This page is about what MapleGather charges your organization. Tax on the invoices your organization sends its own members is a separate feature on a separate plane of billing — one we’re still building — and nothing here affects it.