A Patreon conundrum

In my enthusiasm for getting started on Patreon, I didn’t think through all the tax-related ramifications. I knew I might have to pay income tax on the proceeds, and am glad to do so. However, I didn’t think about sales tax.

The reward I had envisioned falls under the sales tax rules where I live. This means that if I keep providing exclusive digital goods for patrons, I would be legally required to find out whether patrons lived in North Carolina, and if so, pay the relevant sales tax to the state. I’m not inclined to do this; I don’t have any way of finding out where my backers live through Patreon.

I’m going to go ahead as originally planned for this month, but I can see a couple of alternatives for after that:

  1. Provide no special rewards for backers (just, I hope, the satisfaction of supporting someone who’s providing useful content for free to anyone who likes it).
  2. Let backers suggest words for me to encode, but make the resulting stitch patterns non-exclusive and free to my blog readers.

I’m inclined toward number two, since it’s closest to the original reward.

What do you think?