The letter that pays zero

The leak-plugging day has a legal centerpiece: how to pay themselves without handing the tax authority a cut. Paid as honorarios, a million-peso salary would trigger a 10% withholding per transaction, 900,000 pesos landing where a million left ▸ 11:43. The alternative is Article 383 of the tax statute: register each founder as an independent contractor rather than an employee, and so long as they earn under the roughly 4.5-million threshold and don’t themselves employ two or more people, the labor-income withholding table applies, which at that income is zero ▸ 12:24.

The shield is paperwork, signed monthly, per person. First a cuenta de cobro, an invoice from the contractor to the company, “honorarios por servicio de soporte técnico, mantenimiento y desarrollo de la aplicación Severo” for the month ▸ 15:03. Then the sworn Article 383 declaration, stating under oath that the signer hasn’t contracted two or more workers for 90-plus days this fiscal year and requesting the labor table, so the applicable withholding is zero ▸ 15:47. The confusing clause about “two or more employees” resolves once you read it right: it’s about whether the contractor has helpers, not about the three of them being separate contractors ▸ 16:10.

firmar cada mes para pagar cero →

The elegance is the scaffolding. Rather than build the filing tree by hand, he had Gemini design a folder structure, Master, Legal, Taxes, Accounting split by month, and handed that structure to Antigravity, which wrote a PowerShell script that created every folder and placeholder at once ▸ 11:30, all synced through Google Drive so what one partner touches the others have ▸ 9:06. The plan is to generate every month’s signable documents procedurally too, so compliance shrinks to a signature ▸ 14:54. Paying zero legally, it turns out, is less about the rate than about signing the right sentence every month, on time…