Founding a company in Germany is expensive, slow, and, per one developer's detailed public log, still not done after more than five months.
The developer published a step-by-step account of registering a business entity in Germany. After 152 days and €9,600 in notary fees, mandatory share capital deposits, court registration costs, and related expenses, they had not yet reached the point of being able to send a single client invoice. The post traces how each registration phase depends on the last: notarization before court filing, court filing before tax registration, tax registration before banking, and banking before invoicing. Each step can stall independently.
Germany consistently ranks among the slower EU countries for new business formation, but raw rankings rarely land with the force of a real expense log. For a bootstrapped founder, €9,600 in pre-revenue overhead is not a rounding error. That is runway burned on paperwork before writing a line of code or closing a single sale.
Estonia's e-Residency program built its entire pitch around exactly this frustration, and posts like this one explain why it keeps finding an audience.