Our Launch: Why $397 Beats $1,997

The pricing landscape we entered in 2026

When we mapped the non-resident LLC formation market in early 2026, three companies dominated the conversation among founders outside the US: doola, Firstbase, and Stripe Atlas. Here is how their published pricing compared to ours, for a foreign founder who wants a working US company with a bank account.

All three deliver fundamentally the same legal product as we do. A US LLC formed in roughly 24 to 72 hours. An EIN obtained from the IRS via Form SS-4 — which takes the same 8 to 10 business days for a foreign applicant with no SSN no matter who files it, because the IRS processes it, not the provider. A registered agent. An operating agreement generated from a template and customized. And "bank introductions," which in practice means handing your application to Mercury, Relay, or Wise — companies that make their own approval decisions regardless of who refers you.

So why does the market charge $500 to $2,000 for that? Three reasons, and none of them is the entity itself: brand, sales overhead, and venture-backed cost structure. doola has raised over $20M in venture funding. Firstbase has raised more than $50M. Atlas runs inside Stripe with corporate-margin expectations. Investors expect returns, and those returns are funded by the price you pay.

The actual government costs are tiny — and public

The single most clarifying thing a founder can do is look up what the government charges, because everything above that number is the provider's fee, markup, and margin.

• Wyoming Articles of Organization filing fee: $100 (about $102-$103.75 online once the card processing fee is added). This has been the rate since July 1, 2021 (Wyoming Secretary of State).
• EIN from the IRS: $0. The IRS issues Employer Identification Numbers for free. Foreign founders without an SSN file Form SS-4 by fax or mail; there is no government charge (IRS – About Form SS-4).
• Wyoming annual report: $60 minimum license tax going forward (it is two-tenths of one mill on Wyoming-located assets, or $60, whichever is greater — and only Wyoming assets count, not your global balance sheet) (Wyoming Secretary of State annual report).

Add it up. The hard government cost to form and run a Wyoming LLC in year one is roughly $100 to form, $0 for the EIN, and $60 a year to keep it in good standing. Everything a formation company charges beyond that is service, labor, and margin. That is not a criticism — the labor is real and the guidance has value. It is just the honest baseline every founder should price against.

Our math: how we land at $397

We are smaller than the venture-backed players, and the cost structure reflects it. We operate out of New York and Dhaka with a small team of paralegals and support staff. We do not run paid advertising at scale. We do not have a $20M+ venture round to service. Below is our estimated cost to deliver one formation. These are our internal estimates, not audited figures — we are labeling them honestly rather than presenting them as precise.

We charge $397. On those estimates that is roughly a 50% gross margin — sustainable for the team size we want to be, not VC-scale, but not a hobby either. A provider charging $1,999 for the same deliverables is carrying a far higher margin, and that margin is what a founder funds when they pay the higher price.

What we deliberately do not do at $397

A lower price means trade-offs, and pretending otherwise would defeat the point of an honest launch post. Here is what $397 does not buy:

• No 24/7 phone support team. We respond on WhatsApp and email across NYC and Dhaka time zones, usually within a few hours.
• No dedicated account manager per customer. You email us; we reply. Most questions resolve inside 24 hours, but you are not getting a named concierge.
• No bundled annual tax filing in the base price. We offer Form 5472 + pro forma 1120 filing as a $99/year add-on if you want us to handle it, rather than baking a compliance bundle into everyone's price.
• ITIN is not included. It is a separate $297 add-on, and most founders do not need it — you only need an ITIN for things like PayPal verification or filing a US personal return. Your LLC's EIN is separate and is included.

If you want premium concierge service, a named account manager, and three years of bundled compliance in one box, a higher-priced provider may genuinely fit you better. We aim at founders who want the formation done right and prefer to handle their own compliance with clear guides.

The part nobody prices: Form 5472 and the $25,000 penalty

Here is where cheap-versus-expensive stops being the interesting question. The most expensive mistake a non-resident LLC owner can make has nothing to do with which formation company they chose — it is missing a federal filing.

A foreign-owned single-member US LLC is a disregarded entity for US tax. For most non-residents with no US office, employees, or dependent agent, that means the LLC itself often owes no US federal income tax on foreign-sourced income. But "no tax owed" does not mean "no filing required." If the LLC had any reportable transaction with a related party during the year — including you funding the company, or the company paying you — it must file Form 5472 together with a pro forma Form 1120, every year, even with zero income.

The penalty for missing it, filing late, or filing it incomplete is a minimum of $25,000, under IRC §6038A(d), with additional $25,000 increments if you ignore an IRS notice. Critically, the IRS treats a 5472 filed without its pro forma 1120 (or vice versa) as a failure to file — so a half-done submission triggers the full penalty (IRS – About Form 5472; IRS – Instructions for Form 5472).

This is the line item most founders discover the hard way in year two. It is exactly the kind of thing a $1,999 "Total Compliance" bundle is sold to cover — and it is also something you can do yourself, or hand to us for $99/year, without paying four figures. The penalty does not care what you paid your formation company. It cares whether the form was filed correctly and on time.

The non-resident stack: banking, privacy, and what actually matters

Most non-US founders are not buying an LLC for its own sake. They are buying the stack that lets them collect USD from global customers. Price matters, but so does whether the rest of the pieces work.

Banking. The realistic options for a non-resident with a new LLC and EIN are fintech accounts, not a walk-in branch:

• Mercury — popular with software, SaaS, and e-commerce founders; needs your formation documents and EIN, and makes its own risk decision on your country and business model.
• Relay — strong for founders who want multiple sub-accounts for tax and operating reserves.
• Wise Business — useful when you need to hold and convert multiple currencies and pay suppliers abroad.

No formation provider, ours included, can guarantee approval. Anyone who tells you they have a special back channel is selling you the thing the bank already does for free: receiving your application. We coach you on how to present your business cleanly, which genuinely affects the outcome — but the bank decides.

Privacy. Wyoming does not list LLC members or managers in its public formation record, which is one reason privacy-conscious founders prefer it over states that publish owner names. The registered agent appears on the public record, not you.

BOI reporting. As of FinCEN's March 26, 2025 interim final rule, domestic US entities — including Wyoming LLCs formed by foreign owners — are exempt from Beneficial Ownership Information reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act. This was a live obligation in 2024 and changed in 2025, so older guides will mislead you. We will update customers if the rule shifts again (FinCEN – Beneficial Ownership Information).

The point: the entity is the cheap, commoditized part. The stack around it — banking presentation, the 5472 deadline, choosing the right state for your situation — is where the real value and the real risk live, and none of it costs $1,999.

When the expensive option is actually right

We do not think we are the right answer for everyone, and a launch post that pretends otherwise is just an ad. Pay more, or choose a different structure, when:

• You are raising priced equity within ~6 months. Venture investors overwhelmingly expect a Delaware C-Corp, not a Wyoming LLC, for the Court of Chancery case law and standard financing documents. If that is you, Stripe Atlas or a startup-focused firm is the better fit — pay for the structure your investors require.
• You want genuine done-for-you compliance across multiple years and would rather never think about a tax form. A bundled compliance product has real value if you will actually use it.
• You operate in a regulated niche (certain financial, licensing, or high-risk verticals) where you need hands-on legal counsel, not a formation service.

For the large middle — solo founders, freelancers, e-commerce sellers, SaaS builders, agencies, and consultants who simply need a clean US company and a US bank account — paying $1,999 for what costs $100 to file with the state is hard to justify. The deciding question is not "what is the cheapest provider" but "am I the kind of founder the expensive bundle was built for." If the honest answer is no — if you will read your own onboarding emails and would rather not buy compliance services you do not yet need — then the premium is a tax on a feature you will never use, and we built this product for you.

How to price-check any formation provider yourself

You do not have to take our table on faith — the more useful thing we can give you is the method we used to build it, so you can run it against any provider, including us. The exercise has four steps and needs nothing but the provider's public pricing page and a couple of government sources.

First, find the government floor. Look up what the state charges to file (for Wyoming, the Articles of Organization fee on the Secretary of State site) and confirm the EIN is free from the IRS. Everything above that floor is the provider's fee, full stop. Second, separate one-time from recurring. A low formation price paired with a high annual "compliance" or "registered agent" renewal can cost more over three years than a higher one-time price with a cheap renewal. Map the multi-year total, not the headline. Third, list what is bundled versus what you will actually use. A package that includes bookkeeping, tax filing, and compliance monitoring is only a deal if you will use all three; for a pre-revenue single-member LLC, several of those line items have nothing to do yet. Fourth, check whether the state fee is included or added at checkout. "$X plus state fee" and "$X, state fee included" are different products, and the difference is exactly the kind of surprise that makes this market confusing.

Run those four steps and the price of any provider decomposes into government cost, services you will use, services you won't, and margin. That decomposition — not the headline number — is the honest basis for a decision. We are confident enough in our own pricing to hand you the tool that scrutinizes it.

What this means for your decision

Run the multi-year math. Year one, the gap between us and a fully loaded competitor stack can be well over $1,000. Across several years, with renewal fees and bundles compounding, the difference adds up to thousands of dollars — money that does nothing for your actual business. The entity is identical; only the invoice differs.

Spend the savings where it compounds: marketing, hiring, better tooling, runway. Not on overpaying for the formation layer, which is the most commoditized part of the whole stack.

We are keeping the core formation package at $397, state fee included, for the foreseeable future. The bet is straightforward: more founders choose a fair price, we grow the team modestly, and the unit economics still work. That is the entire thesis behind the launch.

A fair warning against optimizing for price alone

It would be self-serving for a low-price provider to leave you with "always pick the cheapest option," so we will not. Price is one input, and for the commoditized formation layer it is a sensible one to weigh heavily — but two things should override it. The first is fit: if you are venture-track and need a Delaware C-Corp, the cheapest Wyoming LLC is the wrong product at any price, and saving money on the wrong structure is not a saving at all. The second is the quality of the work on the parts that carry real downside. A formation is mostly mechanical, but the EIN application for a non-resident, and especially the annual Form 5472 filing, are places where a careless provider can create an expensive problem that dwarfs any fee difference. The honest framing is to be price-sensitive on the commodity and quality-sensitive on the high-liability steps — and to be suspicious of any provider, cheap or expensive, that blurs the line between the two. We compete on price because the entity genuinely is commoditized; we would never want a reader to conclude from that we think the careful parts are.

Start your Wyoming LLC at $397 today →

Sources: IRS – About Form 5472, IRS – Instructions for Form 5472, IRS – About Form SS-4, Wyoming Secretary of State – Articles of Organization, Wyoming Secretary of State – Annual Report, FinCEN – Beneficial Ownership Information. Provider prices (doola, Firstbase, Stripe Atlas) reflect publicly listed rates as of early 2026.