Start a formation
No payment, no card, no obligation at this stage. What you get back is a written recommendation on the entity and the state, and a fixed quote with the government fee shown separately from ours.
Two ways in. Take whichever is least effort.
Both land on the same desk, and that desk belongs to the people who prepare the filings. There is no qualification script between you and them.
- Call(346) 626-4200
Best when you have a situation rather than a question: an entity that has gone quiet, a deadline somebody else set, a structure with more than one moving part. Fifteen minutes on the phone settles what a long thread will not.
Mon to Fri, 9am to 6pm Eastern
Best when you would rather write it out once and attach something: a prior year return, a certificate from a state you are unsure about, a registry notice whose wording makes no sense. Long emails are genuinely welcome.
Within one business day
What we will ask, so you can have it ready.
None of this is required to make contact. It is set out here because knowing the questions in advance makes the first conversation shorter, and because two of these six answers change the recommendation entirely.
- Takes
- About four minutes to say out loud
- Needed up front
- None of it, strictly
- Changes the answer
- Two of the six
- What you are formingAn LLC suits most owner operated businesses and is what the large majority of people on this page end up with. A corporation earns its extra paperwork when there is outside investment, employee equity or an S election in view. If you do not know which, say so. It is a conversation rather than a quiz, and this is the one answer that is genuinely expensive to unwind two years later.LLC or corporation
- Where you want it formedNot sure is a perfectly good answer and it is the one we recommend if you have no physical presence in any particular state. Telling us where your customers are, where you sit and whether anyone works for you is usually enough for us to settle it. We will say which state fits before anything is filed, including the cases where the popular answer is the wrong one for you.Any state, or not sure
- What the business will actually doOne line is enough. It decides whether a licence applies, whether sales tax registration is somewhere in your near future, and occasionally whether a registry will object to the name you have in mind. Vague is fine at this stage. Wrong is not, so if the plan is still moving, tell us that instead.One line
- Where you are residentThis matters more than anything else on the list. It decides the route to your federal tax number, how many weeks that route takes, and whether an annual information return applies to you that most people have never heard of. Tell us the country and we handle the consequences. If you hold a passport from one place and live in another, mention both.Matters most
- A proposed name, if you have oneIf you have not decided, that is not a problem and it holds nothing up. If you have, we check it against the registry before anything is filed, and against the handful of traps that get otherwise fine names rejected: a word reserved for regulated activity, a designator in the wrong position, a string that reads as confusingly similar to something already on the register.Optional
- Anything with a date attachedA closing, an investor who wants to see a certificate, a bank appointment, a marketplace that has given you thirty days to produce an entity. Say it in the first message. Some parts of this are same week and some are genuinely slow, and knowing which deadline you are up against changes the order we do things in.Say it early
What happens after you reach us.
Written down so you can hold us to it.
- 1Same day
We acknowledge, and ask the two or three questions your message left open
Usually about residence, about whether anybody works for you, and about whether there is a date in play. Nobody passes you to an account executive, because there is not one to pass you to.
- 2One business day
A written recommendation on the entity and the state, with the reasoning
In plain language, including what we would not do and why. If the state everyone talks about is the wrong one for your situation, this is where we say so and show the arithmetic.
- 3With the recommendation
A fixed quote, with the government fee on a line of its own
Our fee and the state's fee are different things and one of them was never ours to keep. You see both numbers, and the renewal numbers for the following two years, before you decide anything.
- 4Then you decide
Nothing follows you around afterwards
There is no sequence of reminder emails and no call from a different number a week later. If the honest recommendation is that you do not need us at all, that is in writing too, and it has happened often enough that we expect it.
- 5Then we file
Name check, articles, registered agent, tax number, internal documents, registrations
In that order, with the slow parts started first rather than last. You get the certificate, the EIN letter, the operating agreement and the member register, and a calendar of what falls due and when.
If you would rather read before you talk.
- For
- People who would rather arrive informed
A good number of people want to turn up to the first conversation already knowing what they think. That is the right instinct and the material is here for it, with no gate in front of any of it.
Where we file works through the twelve jurisdictions we are asked about most, state by state, including the annual costs that do not appear on anybody's pricing page and the two states whose reputation is considerably better than their arithmetic.
Pricing shows our fee, the government fee and the three year total, which is the only comparison that means anything once renewals are in the picture. Resources has the jurisdiction chooser, the cost estimator and the S corp break even calculator, all of which run in your browser and send us nothing.
And how it works sets out the whole sequence end to end, including the parts that are genuinely slow and the reasons they are slow, which is usually a government office rather than us.