Comment by jillesvangurp
3 days ago
Germany’s bureaucracy is a beast—especially for non-Germans like me (originally Dutch). Everything’s wrapped in legalese, paper forms, snail mail, and it’s all in German. Locals don’t question it, and arguing won’t get you anywhere. But the upside? It’s predictable. If you figure out the system and plan well, things do work.
Setting up an UG (the “lightweight” GmbH, though not really light) was a trip. It’s less about simplicity and more about skipping the 25K capital requirement. The process involved notaries, banks, accountants, and multiple agencies. Classic chicken-and-egg problem: you need a bank account to register the company, and need the registration to open the account. The workaround? A weird notary ritual where you literally show them cash.
Costs add up quickly—expect a few thousand euros upfront and ~1500/year in running costs, even for a dormant UG. Mine’s three years old, has zero revenue, and owes me 6K. You don't quite need 25K upfront. But you do need some access to capital. If you want to be frugal, you basically cut out the accountant and deal with the tax office directly. I chickened out and pay my accountant to do that for me. I value my time too much.
I've went through the process twice over the past fifteen years. An absolute PITA but it's doable.
If I did it again now, I’d use an LLM. Bureaucracies are basically just predictable API calls made through forms. Perfect for agentic AIs. There are a lot of steps and each step is tedious (lots of form fields, lots of waiting for people to process these and get back to you) but fundamentally quite simple. Maybe don't let the LLM hallucinate your form input but do use them to pick apart any mail that comes in, translations of key stuff, summarizing the process, double checking things people tell you, composing emails, etc. LLMs speak legalese pretty well and are endlessly patient.
The way to fix this process would be to standardize and automate all the manual steps. Why is a notary involved? Because people use non standard contracts with special clauses. The whole point of standardization is to get rid of all the special clauses, the little exceptions to the norm, and all the other silliness. The chamber of commerce is essentially a database. The whole ritual of getting your company registered in Germany boils down to a months long ceremony to execute an FFing INSERT statement and receiving back a database id. Congratulations! Your company now exists. All the rest is ritualistic bullshit that needs to die.
There are some discussions about an EU Inc. That would be great. Doing business in Germany really sucks currently. This was a big theme during the last election round. So, it's not just my opinion. I'm not sure what Eisenhower did but as a battle hardened military person he'd be well familiar with bureaucracies getting in the way of winning a war.
In the famous words of despair.com, "Tradition: Just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid.": https://despair.com/products/tradition?variant=2457305795
I help people navigate German bureaucracy for a living.
The biggest issue in my opinion is unpredictability. Every state, city, office and case worker does things differently. They have different requirements, policies and timelines. My job is not to document the truth but the variance.
My favourite recent bit of German bureaucracy was the integration test to apply for citizenship. I had to apply for an in-person appointment. The appointment was to book a test date. The test is a 33-question, multiple choice test. Getting the appointment can take a few weeks. The test date is 1-4 weeks later. Grading the test takes up to 8 weeks.
All of that to answer 33 questions.
The word kafka-esque was inspired by German bureaucracy. Making an appointment to make an appointment sounds exactly like that.
I once queued in at the local council in Berlin for a guy that handed out numbers for the machine in the waiting room. When your name comes up, you go to the assigned room for whatever you needed (something related to my registration if I remember correctly). All the guy did was push a button and hand out a number. So you queue to start queuing. Very nice guy and friendly. But also one of the most pointless jobs I've ever seen.
Somebody later explained to me that they invented jobs like this to keep otherwise completely redundant former DDR civil servants in some kind of job. They had way too many of those and they were kind of very unemployable in a city with very high unemployment (at the time). It's literal busy work that they invented to avoid having to fire the person. Besides, being a civil servant is an iron clad job for life in Germany. So firing wasn't an option to begin with.
A German DOGE wouldn't be a bad thing at this point. Maybe do it without all the hyperbole and libertarianism. But the CDU that just won the election did actuall campaign on the notion of Germany being crippled by its own bureaucracy. Which of course the CDU helped create for the many decades they've been in power (almost on stop since WW II). The last four years were one of only two (I think) exceptions to that.
Damn, we have it good in France. It costs less than 10 euros to open a micro-company and you only need to have a separate account in your personnal bank (you dont need to open a pro account) . Of course its limited in term of revenue you can make with it but it erase totally the "I cant do this one shot consulting gig a friend ask me to do"
What GP outlined was opening up a limited liability company in Germany, which comes with more liability protections than alternative company types, but also more responsibilities, which if you offload them to e.g. an accountant results in a non-negligable baseline cost.
If you were to open a sole proprietorship ("Einzelunternehmen"), or even just a "Gewerbe" for side-hustles, you can also get things up in a quite lean way and with low overhead costs.
> it erase totally the "I cant do this one shot consulting gig a friend ask me to do"
At leas in Germany, I think the bigger (perceived) hurdle is that most employment contracts state that side-gigs need to be announced to the employer, and just going through those motions is too much of a hurdle.
In Germany, there is as well the Freiberufler status for one-off side gigs. I don't know all the details, but my wife used that for a one-off job.
In some countries you can buy an empty company which was created just to get you a headstart on the creation process. Wonder if that is a thing in Germany...
Yes, buying pre-founded companies is/was also a thing here.
I think in Berlin there was quite a demand for that in the ~2017 crypto wave, where a lot of companies were being founded and at the same time notaries/district courts were backlogged and the normal founding process could take a few months.
I doubt there is as much demand for it right now. I just founded a GmbH and the full process took 4 weeks (of that 1 day of active work). It would have been 2 weeks if I hadn't missed a letter regarding application fees, and it also helped a lot that I was flexible regarding notary appointments.
So with all of that, there is little value in using a pre-founded company, especially since you will very likely need a notary appointment anyways (for ownership transfer and/or adjusting the bylaws).
There are some gotchas, like how it can take a while (8 weeks for me last year) to get your tax number, and some (or perhaps most/all?) banks don't issue a credit card if your business account hasn't existed for at least six months or something. I can see how a startup not short on cash but in a hurry to start buying/selling could benefit from taking an existing company over.
Are you telling me that in Germany it's a viable business model to make a business creating and selling businesses?
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