I argued against the 500 dollars for 6 years by comparing it with a number that does not exist

I did it myself in 2019 and I have recommended doing it yourself ever since, on the grounds that 500 dollars is a lot of money for filling in a form. That reasoning was lazier than it sounded. It compares a price against a form, and the form is not the thing you are buying.

Stripe atlas vs registering an llc yourself is the question I get asked most often by people in my position, and I have been answering it with an argument rather than with the pages.

So this week I went looking for what each side actually publishes. It took me most of an afternoon with the Atlas pricing page open beside the Delaware instructions, and 2 sentences in that pair changed my answer.

Here is what each one says. What follows is the stripe atlas cost breakdown as published, the list of what you would be doing instead, and the 2 items on that list that a person sitting outside the United States genuinely cannot do alone.

What the 500 dollars covers, in their words

The price is stated as a one time setup fee, and the parenthesis after it is the part worth reading twice: 500 dollars, “one-time setup fee (includes government fees and your first year of registered agent services)”.

So the number is not a service charge sitting on top of the state's bill. It is a single figure with the state's bill inside it, and Stripe does not publish the split.

After that it is “$100 annually after your first year (renews automatically)” for the registered agent, which Delaware requires, and which you can cancel at any time.

The bundle is listed item by item. Incorporation in Delaware including next day expedited processing and the state filing fees, a company tax ID, founder equity issuance and share purchase, the 83(b) election filing, and document templates. Then 2,500 dollars of Stripe product credits for the first year, and access to over 50,000 dollars of partner discounts.

The page also says more than 100,000 founders have used it, which is a number about adoption rather than about outcomes and I am recording it as such.

The item I was wrong about

My argument for years was that every line in that list is either free or nearly free, so the 500 is mostly convenience. Six of the lines are. One is not, and it is the one I never thought about because I solved it accidentally in my first month.

Delaware law requires every entity to have and maintain a registered agent in the state, and the agent must have a physical street address in Delaware. Then comes the sentence that decides this whole comparison for anybody reading from outside the country: “If the business is physically located in Delaware, then the business may act as its own registered agent.”

Read the first word of that sentence again. You cannot be your own agent from Lisbon, or from Warsaw, or from Bogotá. You are buying that service from somebody no matter which route you take, so the honest comparison is not 500 against 0. It is 500 against the cost of an agent plus everything else you do yourself, and the agent is a recurring line rather than a one off, which means the comparison is between a bundle and a subscription rather than between a purchase and a free afternoon.

For 6 years I had been comparing the fee against a number that does not exist.

What you would be doing instead

The state's own instructions run to 8 steps and I have followed them. None of the 8 is hard. Several are slow in places that surprise you, and the slowness is not evenly spread.

Name reservation is optional. It costs 75 dollars and holds the name for 120 days. I skipped it in 2019 and would skip it again unless the name matters more than the timing does.

The certificate goes in through the filing service or by post to the Division of Corporations in Dover, and there is a line on that page I would put on a poster: “No requests can be returned via fax or email.” Post out, post back, from wherever you are.

A certificate of status, which some banks ask for, is 50 dollars in short form or 175 in long form. If you want it expedited alongside an expedited filing there is a further fee for that too.

And one line that costs nothing and matters when you are paying with a card at midnight in another time zone: “All transactions submitted on this site are non-refundable.”

The tax ID is the step people expect to be the difficult one and it is not, at least not in the sense of costing money. What it costs is a particular kind of patience, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend the do it yourself route is smooth. Every step in it is available to you. They are simply arranged in a queue where each one waits on the one before, and the queue is indifferent to which time zone you are sitting in when it stalls.

What stripe atlas does not cover

This is the part I would read before the price, and it is on their own page rather than in a review.

“Atlas is not a law firm and information provided by Atlas or Cooley is not legal, tax, or accounting advice and using Atlas does not create an attorney-client relationship.” The templates are made in collaboration with Cooley LLP, and the same page says Cooley is not affiliated with Atlas.

Read that next to the item list. The templates are there to help you sell, hire and run the business, and the disclaimer says nobody is advising you on whether they fit your situation. Both statements are true and they sit 2 screens apart.

Nothing on the page promises a bank account either. I looked for it, because that is the question I am asked most often by people in my position, and the closest thing is the tax ID, which is a prerequisite for an account rather than an account.

I find it hard to be even handed about that pairing, and I want to say why rather than pretend to neutrality. The templates are the most attractive item on the list for somebody who has never seen an American share purchase document. They are also the item the disclaimer covers most completely. That is not a criticism of the disclaimer, which is honest and prominent. It is a comment on how the 2 things read when you are the person deciding at midnight.

I do not know how good the templates are. I have not used them, I have no basis for comparing them with what a lawyer would draft for a specific company, and I am not going to guess from the fact that a well known firm helped write them.

An aside about the word incorporate

Atlas describes itself as incorporating your startup in Delaware, C corp or LLC, and the pricing page uses incorporation throughout. An LLC is formed rather than incorporated, and the certificate is a certificate of formation rather than of incorporation.

That has nothing to do with the money and I would not raise it except that the vocabulary trips people at exactly the wrong moment, when a bank or a client asks for the certificate of incorporation and the document in your folder has a different word at the top. Anyway, back to the comparison.

Incorporation services compared, honestly

I cannot do incorporation services compared as a table, because the other providers do not publish what Stripe publishes and I am not going to build a comparison out of 1 disclosed price and several undisclosed ones.

What I can do is name the 2 things that are genuinely being bought here, because once you see them the 500 stops looking like a filing fee with a markup.

The first is the registered agent, for the reason above, and the price of that alone is not 0 for anybody outside Delaware.

The second is the sequencing. Formation, then tax ID, then equity issued, then the 83(b) filed within its own deadline, in that order, without a gap where somebody is waiting for a document that has not arrived. I have run that sequence myself and the failure mode is never a hard step. It is a step that has to happen after another step, done by somebody who is asleep when the office is open.

There is a third thing being bought and I nearly left it out because it is not on the list. Nobody at the Division of Corporations is going to tell you that step 4 needed to happen before step 6. The instructions are a set of steps rather than a schedule, and the difference between those 2 documents is where most of the money and most of the delay actually goes for a founder abroad.

Which I would choose now

For a single member LLC with no investors, no equity to issue and no 83(b) to file, I would still do it myself, and I say that having just talked myself out of half of my own argument. Three of the bundled items do not apply to that company at all.

For a company with co-founders, vesting and any intention of raising money, I would not, and this is the change of position. The sequencing is worth paying for when 3 of the steps have deadlines that run from each other, and the 83(b) window in particular is short enough that a slow week costs more than the fee.

My instinct is that most people arguing about this in public are arguing about the first case while quoting the second one's requirements. I would not defend that as more than an instinct.

One more thing I would tell somebody deciding this week, and it is not on either page. The choice is reversible in one direction only. You can start alone, get stuck at the agent step and buy that service separately without losing anything you have already done. Going the other way is not a thing either page describes: having paid the bundle, there is no route back to the individual pieces, no partial refund named anywhere on either site, and the Delaware page states in its own words that everything submitted there is non-refundable, which is the closest thing to an answer that exists.

What I cannot tell you

How much of the 500 is the state's fee. Stripe says government fees are included and does not break out the figure, so anybody publishing the split has estimated it.

Whether the templates suit your company. The page tells you plainly that nobody is advising you on that, and I am not qualified to overrule the disclaimer.

What I got wrong, in one line, is that I priced the alternative at zero for 6 years. The alternative has never been free for anybody living outside Delaware. I gave that advice for 6 years, to people whose position was exactly mine.