I went to buy a license for Visual Micro. I'm in the UK. VM seems to be based in the UK. All the prices are in USD, so there's exchange rate stuff and if I pay from my debit card I'll get foreign currency transaction fees added as well. And then VM will lose a chunk the same way bringing the money back into GBP. This seems daft. Is there no way of buying in GBP? I mean, if nothing else there's Paypal or bank transfer.

Thanks for the thought. You won't believe the nightmare that forced me to use a service to handle sales!

It's all down to EU VAT laws for software (digital purchases). It's a nightmare and prevents us from saying we are in the UK and prevents us all from benefiting from UK VAT laws which would require more than 80k of VM sales before VAT has to be applied.

No, because we are part of the EU we have to record every sale, not just where it was purchased but where the software is used. It requires complicated tracking and complicated forms to be filled out.

So not only do we loose the conversion rate I also loose 8% to pay for FastSring to mange the EU VAT and pay for the dollar purchase to be converted back to pounds.

You are right. It's a joke!

Yeah, sounds a pain.

Any way I can pay in USD? The website's automatically deciding I'm in the UK so will pay in GBP but I've a Revolut card that'll do USD direct, so no bank charges

You can do whatever you it lets you do :)