I've been to Sofia. Its a good place to start a business and has the best coworking space in Eastern Europe (look up Puzl Coworking).
Downside is that English is not at all widespread (except among the IT elite and some young people), air pollution can be pretty bad, and there are problems with street dogs. They use the Cyrillic alphabet, so you at least have to learn that to get by.
Like most European countries you also have a byzantine mess of taxes if you want to hire a worker or pay yourself. You also have royalty withholding taxes if a US company pays you.
Well thats a bit unfair. English is very popular among the young people in bulgaria, since it was a required subject in most schools, starting from the 90s, so everyone below age 30-40 knows at least some english, most understand it quite well.
As for taxes - they are one of the lowest in europe, specifically regarding softweare companies. Which is the main reason that it currently has so many local and foreign IT companies operating here. And I think that is why there are so many it people as well, because of the prevalence of employers (and the bidding war for talent which inadvertently raises salaries)
But I agree that knowing Cyrillic is a plus, though I’ve known quite a few people that have lived happily in Bulgaria for 5+ years with english as their only means of communication.
>As for taxes - they are one of the lowest in europe, specifically regarding softweare companies.
I researched Bulgarian market when we were looking for a place to open an EU branch.
Nominal taxes are low, but a dazzling assortment of different welfare charges effectively amounted to extra tax. That's not much different how it's typically done in other ex-bloc countries.
Before that, during my years freelancing, ePAM systems tried to bring me there on a very competitive package, comparable to what I had in Canada.
When the talk came to taxes, I just got that "don't worry, we have good tax consultants," and then when I persisted on getting to know how it all is gonna work, I was told of a dizzyingly complex scheme where they were to setup 2 companies on my behalf and "lease intellectual property" from one, while I would've been getting near zero interest loan from another, owning a stake in it.
After hearing that, I firmly changed my mind.
My advice to Eastern European taxmen would be to stop disguising tax as welfare charges. Plainly admit that the net tax rate closes on to 40%, and work from there.
Germany, as one of our C-levels was German. Despite of all taxes, bureaucracy, scarce microelectronics talent. All that wasn't as important as the ease of initial setup.
For top five, those were your expected Eastern European countries strong in programming: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria. In the end, purely going there for tax advantage didn't worth the effort. We calculated that net difference for an office of 5~7 people was no more than 17% as long as we repatriated the revenue. All our senior staff has contracts with fixed net income exactly because we expected that they will be moving around a lot. Were they to receive their net salary in Bulgaria as regular salaried employees, their net tax would be approaching 50%. There, we would be clearly not gaining much over Germany, even if we were to include corporate tax into calculation.
Cyrillic is not that hard. I learned basic reading Cyrillic from traffic signs while transiting Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia, over the course of two days.
I have found from the opposite way that the English alphabet is not so dissimilar to the Cyrillic. Once you get past that a bectop is a vector, and everything is nearly the same. I find there is a vitality in the region that I cannot find anywhere else, but it feels like living when I am there. I have been to many countries in the region and they all feel close to home.
BEKTOP (K everywhere where you’re used to C) just like the use of B,K,P in modern Greek, e.g. coma is κώμα rho is ῥῶ, B, βήτα (beta character) is pronounced "vita."
If you know Greek alphabet already (which many people do from math & science, or heck, even Greek societies in the USA), looking the shapes of the capital letters in it gets you almost all the way to explaining the differences between Latin and Cyrillic, since Greek is the common ancestor of both.
Street dogs (and cats) are not a problem. They roam around happily and cause no trouble outside of perhaps being "barky" at times. Additionally, getting around knowing only English is super easy. Not knowing Bulgarian is a non issue especially in the bigger towns.
Source. I literally just petted a street dog in Sofia 3 hours ago. I'm a Canadian who moved to BG from Vancouver Canada for a better life. I love it here.
The water was pretty fantastic though, I'll admit. Particularly after coming from Poland, with its gritty, hard water that turns all of your surfaces brown with iron rust or white with calcium deposits.
Downside is that English is not at all widespread (except among the IT elite and some young people), air pollution can be pretty bad, and there are problems with street dogs. They use the Cyrillic alphabet, so you at least have to learn that to get by.
Like most European countries you also have a byzantine mess of taxes if you want to hire a worker or pay yourself. You also have royalty withholding taxes if a US company pays you.