Zero Is a Price. So Is the One They Will Not Print.

This comparison is written by an interested party. Delaware Registered Agent.ai sells the same Delaware appointment Inc Authority bundles, at a published $99 per year, and benefits if you switch. What follows rests on something you can check yourself in about four minutes, which is the absence of a number on a public website.

Twelve Months at No Charge Is a Real Offer

Buy an Inc Authority formation package and the registered agent service rides along free for the first year. We tried to find the counterweight such offers usually carry and came up empty: no activation charge, no truncated coverage, no early-termination fee that we could identify. A compulsory annual service, provided for a year at zero cost, is a straightforward benefit to anyone assembling a company on a thin opening balance. Take the credit as given.

The Renewal Figure Is Not Anywhere

What the service costs in year two is not stated. Not in the terms, not on the premium package pages, not among the published answers to common questions, and not on the front page. The reasonable inference is that the amount is delivered at checkout or by telephone, at a point when the free year has already accomplished its purpose.

We are not going to estimate it. A fabricated competitor price would be worth less than nothing here, since the entire argument of this page is about what gets published.

Two consequences stand on their own without any figure attached.

Registered agent service is inherently recurring. Delaware requires the appointment for the whole existence of the entity, so the renewal is not an incidental term of the deal. It is the deal, and it is the part left blank.

And the moment of disclosure is doing work. A buyer at checkout has committed maximum intent while holding minimum information. A buyer at month thirteen has a formation history, a public record built around the vendor's address, and a state filing standing between them and any alternative. The remedy is not complicated: ask for the renewal rate in writing before you order, from Inc Authority or from anybody, and decline to proceed without it.

Why Delaware Raises the Stakes on This Particular Blank

Delaware charters an enormous number of companies that do no business in Delaware. That is the state's entire commercial proposition: incorporate here, operate anywhere, maintain no local premises and no local staff. It works, and it is why so many owners reading this have never set foot in Wilmington.

The consequence for your vendor relationship is worth sitting with. If the company has no office, no employee and no other counterparty inside the state, then the registered agent is the sole party representing it on Delaware soil. There is nobody else to collect a summons, nobody to notice a notice, and no way for you to inspect the arrangement personally. Everything the state sends and everything a plaintiff serves passes through one supplier you selected online.

A supplier occupying that position should not be one whose future pricing you cannot look up. Not because withholding it is sinister, but because the relationship is structurally long, remote and hard to audit, and those are exactly the conditions under which an unknown recurring price becomes expensive.

What We Publish

Ninety-nine dollars in the opening year, and the identical ninety-nine in each one that follows, printed on our pricing page in advance of any commitment. Papers served at our Delaware office are scanned and sent out on the day they are received. Compliance reminders come ahead of the state's dates. Our Delaware address stands in for yours on the public record. Nothing sits above the plan for a salesperson to move you into.

One correction we make against our own interest: BetterLegal's $90 is the lowest published Delaware figure we found. Ours sits among the lowest, not beneath them all.

If You Switch From Inc Authority, Delaware Charges $50

The exit is a single certificate and a modest fee. Delaware assesses $50 on an amendment specifically captioned to change the registered office or registered agent under 6 Del. C. § 18-1105(a)(11), lodged with the Division of Corporations, and the state does not number its forms, so the caption is what you check before submitting.

Secure the incoming agent before the certificate is drafted, since the document has to name one, and let the existing appointment stand until Delaware's record shows the replacement. That ordering is what keeps the entity continuously represented rather than briefly unrepresented. The complete procedure is laid out on our change of agent page.

Order Here Published and unpublished rates alike are catalogued on the rankings page.