I want to buy a Framework laptop, but I am in Eastern Europe, in European Union. And I wonder whether I should buy it and import it from the US or wait for Framework to open sales in the EU. I don’t care about the national keyboard layout since everyone here uses the US layout (I never actually seen the national one). So the question to Framework is: are you planning to open more like in December or sooner or still don’t know? And the question to the community is: what are your experiences with importing to the EU? How long does it take? How high customs are?
I’m sort of in the same boat. I’m in Portugal waiting for the EU release, also don’t care about the Portuguese keyboard layout as I use ANSI anyway. I decided to wait cause importing sounds like a really bad proposition. First you’ll have to wait for your batch anyway, then you need to hire a forwarding company, which means you’ll pay US sales tax, then it gets shipped here, and on top of the company’s handling and shipping fee and US sales tax you’re going to pay your country’s VAT plus importing duties. Then you’re out of luck if you need any sort of technical support, cause you’ll have a non-official import in your hands. It’s not clear how much time you’ll save, but it’s clear you’ll spend a lot more.
To try answer the Question You asked the community. I live in Denmark. I Live in EU. I find delivery times(inside EU ) to be faster than buying in a national store Online. Outside EU like in England (a Typical Amazon delieveries) can be reasonable. Customs are not too high as trade is high between EU and England. EU and US? Unless they use Fedex My experience has been like… I shall pray to jesus if I receive it before the first month is over.
I hope my potato laptop survives long enough for me to order a framework
and that when will be available in Europe will be the whole EU
not just Germany, France, Italy, Spain and few others.
Is there any official post from framework team about this topic?
I asked this exact same question before and got no answer. All we know is “before the end of the year” in “some European countries”.
For North Americans Framework is an oasis in the desert, for us Europeans it’s still a mirage that keeps moving farther into the distance as we trundle ahead in the hot sand, tired and thirsty.
Yeah - we have a thing via NZpost where you can send items to warehouses in the USA and they will forward onto NZ (for a price + import etc). Could be a good option since the charger is modular?
@offtobettershores you can use MyUS for the shipment forwarding and they have a tax free warehouse which means you won’t be paying taxes in US and double it by paying in your destination country, instead you will pay only at the destination country. That said I’ve ordered one from the October batch so… still waiting for it to ship to the forwarding service but I’ve used that forwarding service a couple of times and they work pretty well.
@MikeCH Then it’s not so bad. There’s still the question of support, but I would consider it if framework had not left a promise in the air. It would definitely help if they were a little more precise about their time frame for EU release.
@Wiktor_Tomanek I’m currently exploring the options of involving a freight forwarder (I’m also based in the EU). As far as I have found out so far, the EU customs tariff for computers is 0%, so all that will be due when importing is the VAT of the country you’re based in (import sales tax).
@Oliver You also have to pay forwarding company. Frame.work promised that they will open sales in the EU this year, so I decided to wait, mainly because shipping from the US won’t speed up the process significantly, but also because I want to have it with a clear keyboard.
