Every limited liability company (LLC) and corporation operating within the United States must designate a registered agent. This important role ensures that the state government has a point of contact for your business, enabling it to deliver important documents to a known entity.
You can serve as your own registered agent, or you can hand off this role to a family member or close friend. Maybe you even have the budget to hire an attorney or accountant to handle registered agent responsibilities!
Here at Incorporation Guru, we strongly prefer hiring a reputable registered agent service like Incfile. Registered agent services cost much less than a lawyer or accountant, and they’re far more reliable and private than serving as your own agent. With its reasonable registered agent pricing and amazing free business formation offer, Incfile is in our top three registered agent services!
Let’s discuss the pros and cons of Incfile and break down what it can offer your business for registered agent service. Is this the right company for you?
Our Preferred Alternative: ZenBusiness
Before we get started, we would like to quickly introduce you to ZenBusiness, our favorite company for both business formations and registered agent service.
If you haven’t yet formed your LLC or corporation, ZenBusiness will handle the formation process and provide one year of annual report service, all for one low price of $49! It’s an incredible bargain, especially considering that ZenBusiness is our top choice for registered agent, LLC, and incorporation services!
Why Should I Hire a Registered Agent Service?
As we mentioned, every formal business entity in the United States needs a registered agent to receive document deliveries from the state and forward them to the business. While this might sound unnecessary, it’s actually crucially important.
If you don’t have a registered agent, the state doesn’t know how to reliably contact your company. This means that your business could miss service of process, tax forms, and other vital document deliveries. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to your business losing its good standing, being sued without your knowledge, and more.
While some businesses like hiring an attorney or accountant to be their registered agent, this can be extremely expensive, and your chosen lawyer or CPA may not even have much meaningful experience in the role.
On the other side of the coin, serving as your own agent (or designating a friend or family member) has plenty of issues as well. You would need to be present at your business address every weekday during standard working hours to ensure no missed deliveries. You may also need to make your personal address a matter of public record, which has obvious privacy concerns.
Meanwhile, a registered agent service provides the best of both worlds. You’ll save tons of money over hiring an attorney or accountant while ensuring your own privacy and avoiding the potential for missed deliveries. What’s not to like about that?
Incfile Registered Agent Service Review
Incfile is our third overall choice for registered agent service, for a handful of reasons. Let’s start by talking about the pros and cons of its service, then move into the details.
Pros
- Reasonable registered agent pricing
- Free business formation service
- Stellar customer feedback
- One year registered agent service free w/ formation purchase
Cons
- Lots of add-ons and upsells
Incfile Registered Agent Service Package
Incfile only has one package available for registered agent service. With a price point of $119 per year, it’s competitively priced, although you can find cheaper options. However, if you haven’t yet formed your LLC or corporation, Incfile has an incredible offer: they’ll form your business entity for free and throw in a year of registered agent service at no extra charge!
Incfile says that it currently has 250,000 registered agent service customers, which is an impressive volume. It doesn’t include too many features with its registered agent service package, but it does offer an email notification service and a digital dashboard to help you manage your service.
One of the reasons Incfile ranks behind ZenBusiness and Northwest Registered Agent in our guide to the top registered agent services is this lack of features. Northwest includes same-day local document scanning, while ZenBusiness offers annual report service and more.
Overall Pricing and Value:
Incfile’s price point for registered agent service is a flat $119 per year. While this does undercut many competitors’ pricing models, there are still cheaper options available (like Harbor Compliance for $89-99/year). That said, we certainly do not know of any companies that can top Incfile’s offer of a free business formation service that includes 12 months of registered agent service!
While we do wish Incfile either offered more features or a slightly lower price point for registered agent service, we can’t find any other reasons to dock them points in this category.
Track Record:
Incfile has plenty of experience, as it has formed more than 500,000 business entities and currently serves as the registered agent for 250,000 companies. Even more impressive is its customer feedback reputation. Incfile has tens of thousands of customer reviews available online, and nearly all of them are positive in nature.
Incfile customers seem to really appreciate its free business formation package and also compliment the company’s ease of use. All told, it would be hard to find a company in this or any industry with a better track record than Incfile’s.
Customer Support:
We are of two minds when it comes to Incfile’s customer support network. On one hand, Incfile’s phone support is rock-solid, with quick response times and helpful associates. On the other hand, its email support is almost entirely worthless, as they rarely even bother to respond. On the rare occasions Incfile has responded to our emails, it’s almost always with a templated form response that doesn’t actually address our problem.
It’s especially frustrating because this has been a significant problem for years and Incfile has not taken any noticeable steps to improve upon it. That’s why Incfile receives a middling score in this category — if you really need to get ahold of them, calling them on the phone is usually your only option.
Ease of Use:
The entire point of using a registered agent service is to make this part of your business run seamlessly with little-to-no effort on your part. Incfile certainly fits the bill, as it’s incredibly simple to place orders, renew services, and navigate its website.
That said, we’re a bit disappointed by how Incfile pushes a handful of upsells and third-party partnership offers throughout the ordering process. While Incfile doesn’t get as pushy as some competitors get in this regard, it’s still a bit annoying to navigate around them.
How Does Incfile Work?
The process of ordering registered agent service from Incfile couldn’t be much simpler. Here’s an overview of what you can expect when you click the “order registered agent service” button on the Incfile website.
- Enter your personal and business info: The first page asks for your contact information, including your name, email address, and phone number. It also requires you to fill out your formation state, entity type, and the state where you need registered agent service. Finally, you’ll need to tell them your business address and whether you want Incfile to handle your “change of registered agent” filing.
- Provide your billing info: The only other step required for Incfile registered agent service is filling in your billing address and credit card information. That’s it! Incfile truly does make this process easier and more streamlined than most competitors.
What Are Incfile Customers Saying?
Incfile truly excels in this category, as it has a large quantity of high-quality customer reviews. There are more than 30,000 reviews available on reputable third-party review websites for Incfile, and it still manages to maintain an impressive 4.8 out of 5 average score.
Obviously, it’s borderline impossible to read through all 30,000+ reviews but we were able to glean some general trends from this feedback. In short, Incfile’s customers absolutely love the free business formation package, and also frequently praise the company’s ease of use.
We have long been impressed by Incfile’s glowing customer feedback. This company has a higher volume of reviews than any other company we know of, and the fact that it maintains such high ratings is a testament to its outstanding customer satisfaction reputation.
Our Final Thoughts
Incfile ranks third in our list of the best registered agent services and second for LLC formations and incorporations. This company is one of the only companies offering business formations for free, and it even includes a full year of registered agent service at no extra charge!
While Incfile doesn’t offer the lowest price points available for registered agent service, its incredible free offer for business formations includes a free year of registered agent service. Overall, we think Incfile does enough to justify charging slightly higher prices for registered agent service than some competitors.