How We Helped Freelanceclients.com Move Business to Georgia
- Tinatin Tolordava
- 1 hour ago
- 10 min read
Building FreelanceClients.com Without Borders
A story about taxes, yes. But also about culture, comfort, and finally feeling supported.
When your business is fully remote, geography stops being a constraint and becomes a choice. That realization hit Denis Apostu and Alexandra Stanga after years of building a digital business that no longer depended on where they lived.
“If we do everything online,” Denis tells Valerian Gegidze, CEO of Gegidze, during the podcast, “why wouldn’t we choose the best possible place to live?”
That simple question set everything in motion.
Denis and Alexandra Stanga are the co-founders of FreelanceClients.com, a remote-first business that helps freelancers win clients through outbound marketing. Their customers are mostly in the US and the UK. Their work is digital and their operations don’t depend on geography.
In theory, this is the ideal modern business.
In practice, their home country kept pulling it back into complexity.
What wasn’t working in Romania
When Alexandra says, “Even if you breathe, you have to pay,” she isn’t being dramatic.
Before Georgia entered the picture, Denis and Alexandra explained what daily financial decisions looked like in Romania.
Each rule made sense in isolation, but the problem was how many things had to be tracked at once. On the operational side, this meant constantly juggling questions like:
VAT: Romania’s VAT rate is 19%, but whether it applied wasn’t always clear. It depended on who the client was, whether they were an individual or a company, and where they were based.
“It’s not very streamlined,” Denis explains. “Sometimes we pay it, sometimes we don’t.” That made it harder to look at revenue and immediately understand what the real outcome would be.
Profit tax: Profit is taxed at 16% and paid every three months, even if the money stays inside the company.
“If you make 100K in the last three months,” Denis says, “and you didn’t use it for business purposes, boom. Sixteen thousand just goes away.”
The money could still be sitting in the company and could be planned for future growth, but the tax was still due.
Dividends: Taking money out personally added another layer. Dividend tax had already increased from 5% to 10%, with another increase to 16% coming.
Denis gives a simple example. “You want to take €1,000 out of the company to pay rent, and you pay €160 just for that.”
At that point,revenue stopped feeling like a clear number, growth required constant mental accounting, and even small personal expenses started to feel heavy.
Over time, Denis and Alexandra stopped asking how to optimize further inside the system and started to wonder:
Does this setup still make sense for the kind of business we’re building?
Asking the right questions
Moving away from Romania wasn’t a rushed decision, and it wasn’t triggered by a single bad quarter or a sudden tax increase.
By the time Denis and Alexandra started seriously thinking about moving, they had already been living a semi-nomadic life for years. Different cities, different countries, working from wherever made sense at the time, running the business from laptops, and learning what actually matters day to day when work follows you everywhere.
That experience reshaped the way they thought about the problem. It stopped being a logistical question and became something more personal.
They found themselves asking a different set of questions.
1. Where can we run the business?
That question had already been answered: their work was fully remote, the clients were international, and geography no longer limited operations.
2. Where does it actually feel right to run it?
This one was harder. The question wasn’t about legality or feasibility, it was about daily life, energy, and comfort.
“You’re not just growing your business just to grow it,” Alexandra notes while talking to Valerian, “You ask yourself what the next logical step is. You’re thinking: I could stay here, I love the country. But it doesn’t really serve me anymore. Or I could take a small leap and move to a place that’s just as good, maybe even better, and get more out of what I’ve built.”
3. What matters beyond taxes?
Taxes were part of the equation, of course they were. But they weren’t enough on their own.
Danis and Alexandra wanted a system that made sense without constant interpretation and a place they could imagine staying in, not just passing through, a culture that didn’t feel transactional or alien the moment the newness wore off.
Moving to a different country for Denis and Alexandra wasn’t about chasing novelty or hopping countries for fun. They recognized that when the work is remote, the environment you choose becomes part of how well you work, how clearly you think, and how sustainable the whole setup is.
Looking at the “obvious” options. And why they didn’t stick
Like most founders in their position, Denis and Alexandra started with the usual shortlist.
Is the UAE overrated?
The UAE came up almost immediately: Zero percent tax. Everyone talks about it and it looks perfect from the outside.
But once they slowed down and ran the numbers honestly, the picture changed.
“Yes, it’s zero percent,” Denis explains, “But the cost of living offsets the savings very fast.”
Rent, daily expenses, the general rhythm of life. For the level their business was at, it didn’t add up the way it sounds in headlines.
Other options vs. Romania
Other options followed: Cyprus, Estonia, Hong Kong, even combinations like opening a company in one place and living somewhere else.
On paper, many of them were better than Romania. But something was always off.
Either the taxes improved, but life felt like a compromise. Or the lifestyle looked fine, but the system wasn’t built for how modern digital businesses actually operate.
They kept circling back to the same thought: Where does this work as a whole? Not just fiscally, or just emotionally. But in real, everyday terms.
When Georgia stopped being “an option” and became the option
Georgia wasn’t completely unknown to them. They had heard about it before. Seen it mentioned in conversations.They even came across ads.
But this time, they looked closely.
And almost immediately, something felt different.
Georgia didn’t just offer low taxes. It offered a structure that matched how their business actually worked.
1% tax for IE + Small Business Status
Through the Individual Entrepreneur Small Business Status, qualifying entrepreneurs can pay 1% tax on total turnover, up to 500,000 GEL per year.
For Denis and Alexandra, this wasn’t theoretical. Their work is outbound marketing: Digital services, clients mostly in the US and the UK, no local dependency, and fully remote.
“For what we do,” Denis notes, “this was the sweet spot.”
There was no need to twist the business into a shape that fits the rules. The rules already fit.
They would simply pay 1% on their total revenue - that’s it.
At first, they were cautious, almost suspicious. But this disbelief came from years of dealing with systems where nothing is ever that straightforward.
But the more they dug in, the clearer it became. 1% tax in Georgia wasn’t a loophole, but a system designed with digital, export-oriented businesses in mind.
What made the difference was understanding how this applied to them, not just in theory.
Gegidze helped Denis and Alexandra map their exact business model against Georgia’s tax frameworks. The result was clear: as individual entrepreneurs, they qualified for the 1% small business regime.
Virtual Zone Status
During the process, Gegidze walked Denis and Alexandra through the full range of structures available in Georgia.
This included options like Virtual Zone and International Company status, not as abstract possibilities, but in direct relation to how FreelanceClients.com actually operates.
Together, they looked at two things side by side:
what applied to the business right now
what could become relevant later, if the business evolved
For their current setup, an outbound, service-based business working with international clients, the conclusion was clear.
The Individual Entrepreneur small business regime was the cleanest and most efficient option.
It fit how FreelanceClients.com operates today.
At the same time, it didn’t lock them in.
If the business expanded into product development, tech, or intellectual property in the future, Georgia’s Virtual Zone or International Company status could become relevant. What mattered was knowing that growth wouldn’t force another move.
Soon after arriving in Georgia, with Gegidze’s support, Denis and Alexandra registered under the Individual Entrepreneur small business status. A structure designed specifically for solo founders and digital operators like them.
From doubt to reality in 20 minutes
Before they arrived, Alexandra was convinced the process would take ages.
They had initially planned to do everything remotely, but because of document and postal issues on the Romanian side, they decided to wait and start the setup once they were in Georgia. That delay made her nervous.
“I thought it was going to take ages,” she recalls, “I thought we’d have to wait in the office for hours.”
That expectation came from experience. From dealing with systems where even simple things take time, not because they’re complex, but because the process itself is heavy.
The reality was the opposite.
When they finally went to register the business in Tbilisi, everything happened in one place.
“When we saw it was done in like 20 minutes for two people,” she adds, “we were shocked.”
They did not have to run between the offices to wait for approvals. But what surprised them the most wasn’t the speed of the process, but how the entire interaction felt.
“It didn’t feel like bureaucracy. It felt more like hanging out with a friend.”
People were helpful, direct, and relaxed.
Gegidze coordinated the bank account setup alongside the registration, so there was no gap between having a legal entity and being able to operate it.
Things worked without friction. These processes set the tone for everything that followed. Because once the practical side stopped being stressful, Denis and Alexandra started noticing something else: How Georgia felt outside of paperwork and how it felt to live there day to day.
Georgia didn’t feel like a compromise.
That’s the part Denis and Alexandra keep coming back to. They didn’t trade lifestyle for taxes or comfort for efficiency. The country worked on its own terms.
It helped that Georgia sits in a familiar space for them: Close enough to Eastern Europe to feel culturally understandable, but different enough to feel like a reset.
There were small things that added up quickly in the capital city of Georgia: Walkable streets, beautiful cafés, mountains visible from the city, nature close enough to reach without planning a whole trip around it.
“We used to live in Transylvania, in the mountains, so I got used to going on walks and hiking. It’s simple, but when you work a lot, you really need that,” Alexandra says.
So, for Freelanceclients.com founders, being close to nature wasn’t a lifestyle upgrade, it was already normal. Giving it up just to chase a lower tax rate didn’t make sense. Moving somewhere without seasons, without walkable cities, without easy access to nature would have meant trading something that was already working.
And the cost of living in Tbilisi played its role too. Rent, food, daily expenses: everything felt aligned with reality.
That’s why places like the UAE were never a real fit. Not because they’re bad options, but because they require a different way of living.
Georgia didn’t ask for that trade-off. It offered the same everyday things they were already used to, while improving the parts that weren’t working before.
Thinking beyond the first year
Denis and Alexandra are planning to stay in Georgia for at least five or six years. Not because they locked themselves into something, but because it feels comfortable, safe, and livable.
There are also practical reasons behind that decision.
For Romanian founders, running a business abroad while remaining tax residents back home isn’t realistic. At some point, you have to make a clean move.
So they did.
Gegidze handled the relocation side of the move, including tax residency, so Denis and Alexandra could focus on settling in rather than navigating formalities. The idea was simple: Spend enough time in one place to build a rhythm, then use the flexibility of remote work to travel.
Six months in Georgia, six months exploring.
Georgia isn’t one version of life. It’s several: capital city energy in Tbilisi, coastal life in Batumi, smaller cities like Kutaisi, mountains that feel close enough to be part of daily life.
“It was nice,” Denis remembers their drive to Batumi. “Not our style for living. We like Tbilisi, a walkable, capital city. But Batumi felt like the Miami of Eastern Europe.”
Nice cars, restaurants by the sea, completely different pace. That variety mattered.
If you’re thinking about relocating, Denis’s and Alexandra’s advice is: “be open-minded. Look at different cities. Try more than one.”
Because Georgia isn’t a single experience, it’s a range of them.
Why Georgia worked
The story of Denis and Alexandra is not just about finding the lowest tax rate.
For FreelanceClients.com, Georgia worked because it aligned the three things that matter most once a business becomes truly remote: how you earn, how you live, and how much energy you waste navigating the system around you.
The tax system stopped pulling attention away from the business, the setup process didn’t feel adversarial, daily life didn’t require compromise. Growth stopped feeling like something that needed constant defense.
Denis and Alexandra didn’t move to Georgia to escape something. They moved because the environment matched the way their business already operated: Clear rules, predictable costs, a place they could actually imagine staying in.
When geography becomes a choice, the best option isn’t the loudest or the most advertised one, but the one that quietly works.
For FreelanceClients.com, Georgia did exactly that.
From decision to execution with Gegidze
Relocating a business isn’t only about choosing a country. It’s about navigating details most founders don’t want to spend weeks decoding. Tax status. Registration steps. Compliance. Timing. Knowing what actually applies to you, and what doesn’t.
That’s where Gegidze came in.
From the Gegidze team, Mariam Lomsanidze and Nika Sesitashvili talk openly about what they see from the other side: hundreds of conversations each month, founders coming in skeptical, overloaded, often convinced that something this simple must hide a catch.
Mariam points out that for most clients, the hardest part isn’t the paperwork, it’s believing that a compliant solution can actually be straightforward.
“People put so much work into their business,” she explains. “And at the end of the day, everything goes to tax. Our job is to show them it can be easier. Properly.”
Nika adds that speed and clarity matter more than anything. When someone finally decides to move, delays create doubt. That’s why Gegidze’s focus is simple: respond quickly, explain clearly, help people move forward while the decision is still fresh.
That approach is what Denis and Alexandra experienced firsthand.
Instead of chasing documents or second-guessing every step, with the help from the Gegidze team they were guided through the process with clear expectations and fast answers.
Sometimes the difference between a good idea and a good outcome is having the right people make it happen. For Freelanceclient.com Gegidze was the one that turned Georgia from a good idea into a clean transition.
