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The Founders Review

Rankings of registered agents, LLC formation and foreign registration services in all 50 states.

Our method

How we rank filing services

We rank each service on what a founder pays and what they get over the first three years. Five criteria with fixed weights decide every order, and each page names the one that mattered most.

Written by The Founders Review editorial team

Our criteria and weights

  1. Three-year cost (30%). The service fees you pay in years one to three, from each company's published first-year and renewal prices. State fees are the same whichever service files, so they are shown but not scored.
  2. What one price covers (30%). How much of the yearly paperwork the price includes: the registered agent, the annual or biennial report filed for you, the EIN application, and whether one account works in other states.
  3. Renewal terms (15%). Whether the price stays the same at renewal and how the service handles renewals and cancelling.
  4. Fit for the state (15%). How the service fits that state's rules: its report cadence and late fees, agent address rules and filing steps.
  5. Price clarity (10%). Whether the total due today is shown before you pay, with the state's fee listed separately at cost.

Tight rankings

Scores within a few tenths of each other are close calls. Each ranking page says which criterion decided the order in that state and what the runner-up does better.

Scores

Each ranked service gets an overall editorial score out of 10. Scores are The Founders Review's own judgment from these criteria, not customer ratings. A score is a summary of the five criteria for one state and one service, so the same company can score differently in two states or on two kinds of page.

How we get the numbers

Service prices come from each company's own pricing and service pages, read when we build the site, and every ranking page gives the date they were read. State fees, forms, deadlines and agent rules come from the state's own fee schedules, forms and statutes; each page lists those sources and the month each was last confirmed. Where card or processing charges are added at checkout, we leave the total out and show the service fee.

Which companies we rank

We rank Mainstay Filing and the state's registered agent services, and only for services each one sells with a published price.

Our limits

We publish no customer ratings or quotes and give no legal or tax advice; the order is our own judgment.