Most “best LLC service” pages are written by someone who has never filed an LLC. Ours are not. This page explains exactly what we do, so you can judge how much weight our conclusions deserve.
We buy the services we compare
We order real LLC formations through the providers we recommend, using our own money and our own business. No press accounts, no comped filings, no accounts arranged through an affiliate manager. That matters, because a company that knows it is being reviewed does not behave the way it behaves with an ordinary customer.
From each order we record: what the checkout actually charged versus what the landing page advertised, which upsells appeared and how hard they were to decline, the date we submitted and the date the state stamped the approval, what arrived in the dashboard afterwards, and how long support took to answer a real question. We keep the invoices and the confirmation emails.
State data comes from the state
Filing fees, annual report deadlines, franchise taxes and processing times are taken from the Secretary of State’s own site for that state, not from another blog and not from a formation company’s marketing page. Each state guide records the date we last checked, because these figures move.
What we refuse to do
- No invented scores. You will not find a 9.4/10 on this site. A number that precise, assigned by one person, is decoration pretending to be measurement.
- No price tables. Formation pricing changes monthly and varies by state and by promotion. A price we type today is a price that misleads you in March. We link to the provider’s page instead.
- No universal winner. Every recommendation says who it is wrong for. A service that suits a solo founder in Wyoming is frequently the wrong call for a non-resident founder who needs banking support.
- No pretending to be lawyers. We are not attorneys or accountants. We describe what forms exist, what they cost and how long they take. When a question turns on your specific tax or liability situation, we say so and tell you to ask a professional.
The obvious conflict, stated plainly
We earn commission when readers sign up through our links. See the affiliate disclosure for the full picture. The honest consequence is that we have a financial interest in you buying something. We try to counterbalance it by telling you, on every comparison, when filing directly with the state yourself costs less and works fine. For a straightforward single-member LLC in most states, it usually does.
Corrections
If you find a figure that is wrong or out of date, write to 
. We correct the page and note the date of the change rather than editing quietly.