Comment by cft

If you are paying only yourself you are probably a disregarded entity for tax purposes and you don't get to write off your salary anyway (before 2022 or after).

In theory you could treat your one man startup as a C corp, but that would make very little tax sense, regardless of these changes. Also if it's your own 200k, you don't pay tax on it because you've put it in the bank and then taking it back, even in a C corp: you pay tax on the revenue from others.

The problem seems to arise for purely bootstrapped companies with contractors that have no startup capital. This is quite rare i think, because you'd probably start incurring expenses for a couple of years before you earn any revenue, expenses that you can then amortize once the revenue appears. If you are a small company but not a startup, then your software expenses are probably not R&E, they are ordinary section 162 expenses.

It's a law in the opposite direction nevertheless impeding innovation (i wonder the intent!), because it adds complexity for the tiny poorly funded businesses