Incorporate.com vs IncFile
Read the Incorporate.com vs IncFile LLC review below or get Mark Cuban's recommendation (ZenBusiness) for $0 + state fee.
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Do Incorporate.com and IncFile Offer Good Value?
IncFile and Incorporate.com are two of the many online LLC services. Each of these companies has its advantages over the other.
To begin with, IncFile offers free LLC services, while Incorporate.com charges at least $99. Furthermore, IncFile provides a full year of registered agent service with any formation package, a feature that Incorporate.com doesn’t include at any price point.
However, in general, Incorporation.com is a decent IncFile alternative because it has more longevity than any competitor.
Do you need some more information before making the decision for your business? Read on to find out everything you need to know to make an informed choice.
6 Things They Have In Common
1) Affordable: Both of these LLC service providers can save you a considerable amount of money. As opposed to hiring an attorney to form your new company, Incorporate.com and IncFile are hundreds of dollars cheaper.
2) Customer Support: Saving money is great, but you don’t want to go it alone either. IncFile and Incorporate.com have customer support networks that can make your life much easier. If you have any questions or concerns throughout the formation process, they have the answers you seek.
3) Experience: Experience is the name of the game in this industry, and both of these companies have plenty of it. They’ve both helped form thousands of businesses, and Incorporate.com has even been open since the 19th century! They’re both entirely legitimate and trustworthy operations.
4) Additional Services: If you would like assistance beyond just your LLC formation, Incorporate.com and IncFile both offer dozens of other business solutions. They’re one-stop shops for anything from registered agent service to federal tax ID number (EIN) obtainment.
5) Educational: Do you want to learn more about business formations, startup tasks, industry-specific guidelines, and more? Both Incorporate.com and IncFile have comprehensive learning centers on their websites where you can find tons of relevant info, whether you’re a customer or not.
6) Efficiency: Are you in a hurry to get your LLC formed? That’s no problem for Incorporate.com or IncFile, as these companies both have expediting services available for all 50 states. It costs extra, of course, but it can be worth it if time is of the essence.
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Side-by-Side Comparisons
Pricing
IncFile: IncFile will help you form your business for free (just pay your state’s fee) while also providing a full year of registered agent service. Once the first year is over, the registered agent service will renew for $119 per year, which is a strong price point. In addition, their $149 Gold package and $299 Platinum package are both packed with valuable features that make them strong options as well, even at their higher price points.
Incorporate.com: Their cheapest formation package checks in at $99, and it is as barebones as they get, with no registered agent service or other features at all. Furthermore, their top two packages cost $634 and $734 after you add in all the additional fees associated with them. If you’re going to spend that much on your formation, you might as well just hire an attorney to form your company. Finally, their registered agent costs $235 per year.
Experience
IncFile: IncFile has plenty of experience, with more than 800,000 businesses formed since 2004.
Incorporate.com: Incorporate.com is on another level when it comes to longevity, as they’ve served 750,000+ businesses since they opened way back in 1899.
Customer Support
IncFile: With IncFile, you can receive customer support by phone, or you can email them. We’ve used both of these options many times, and we’ve found that they always have fast response times via phone, and their representatives are both knowledgeable and helpful. However, IncFile’s email support is essentially nonfunctional, as we’ve had several messages go unanswered for weeks. You can access their customer service team from 10 am to 7 pm ET on weekdays.
Incorporate.com: Incorporate.com offers phone, email, and chat support. Their response times are pretty quick, and when we reached out through all three of these options, their representatives were friendly and answered our questions thoroughly while also providing additional information.
Turnaround Times
IncFile: IncFile guarantees that every LLC or corporation formation will be processed and forwarded to your state of formation within one business day. If you need your business formed in a hurry, IncFile offers the ability to order expedited state processing for an additional fee (determined by your state), or you can purchase their Platinum package which includes expedited service.
Incorporate.com: When you reach the bottom of your order form, Incorporate.com gives you detailed turnaround time estimates for both standard and expedited processing. It’s nice to see this level of transparency when it comes to the expected length of time for your formation.
Incorporate.com doesn’t commit to a same-day or overnight turnaround. However, they said that they file ASAP once all of the information they need from the business owner is provided, which is a fair response.
Customer Reviews
IncFile: IncFile gets strong customer feedback. With nearly 34,000 reviews across the web and nearly unanimously positive scores, it’s clear that their customers are quite pleased with the service they receive from IncFile. Their clients often discuss how much they appreciate the simplicity of IncFile’s services and their affordable prices.
Incorporate.com: As for Incorporate.com, they only have nine reviews online, and most of them take a critical viewpoint. Their clients have some issues with their high prices, especially for registered agent service. Customer feedback is a major advantage to IncFile.
Ease of Use
IncFile: As you walk through the process of signing up for IncFile, your steps are personalized based on the state where you’re forming a business and the type of company you wish to establish. There are even little question marks and hyperlinks throughout the application to learn more about a specific question or entry on the form. There are a few upsells and third-party offers to navigate through, but if you opt into any of them, your total price is immediately updated on the screen. There are never any surprises with IncFile.
Incorporate.com: It’s quite simple to form your business with Incorporate.com, although their pricing page is confusing. Two of their listed features (the CSCNavigator compliance tool and the annual report service) are only available to customers who purchase registered agent services separately, and there’s a series of seven upsells as you navigate the application itself. Still, since their website has a clean design, it was easy to find where to place an order and navigate through to the payment page.
Additional Services
Both Incorporate.com and IncFile offer a wide variety of additional services that can help you start, build, and expand your business. They have many services in common, as you can order things like annual reports, business licensing research packages, registered agent service, certificates of good standing, EIN acquisitions, and more from either one of them.
These companies also each have some exclusive services that aren’t offered by the other one. For example, only IncFile offers business accounting services, while only Incorporate.com provides mail forwarding services.
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Which is Right for You?
With either Incorporate.com or IncFile, you’re getting a service provider that can be trusted to form your LLC quickly and effectively. They both have plenty of experience, and either of them will save you a significant amount of money compared to the cost of hiring a lawyer to handle your formation.
If you remain undecided, we’ll finish this comparison by going through common scenarios that may sway your opinion to one provider or the other.
➥ Choose IncFile if You Are:
If you’re looking for a free LLC formation service with great features, or if you value positive customer reviews, you should be quite happy with IncFile.
➦ Choose Incorporate.com if You Are:
If you place a high value on experience and longevity and you want quick customer support, Incorporate.com is a worthy choice to form your LLC.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Got questions? We’ve got answers.
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IncFile’s Silver package ($0 + state fee) is one of the most popular LLC formation packages in the entire industry because it includes a full year of registered agent service along with your formation process. And it truly is free!
If you’re looking for a few more advanced features, their Gold package at $149 is also a good value, as it adds an EIN, company alerts, and an operating agreement.
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Is IncFile the best LLC service? That’s one of our most-asked questions. For a close-up look at how they compare to other top-rated LLC services, check out our comparisons below:
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One of the only areas where IncFile comes up short in our opinion is when it comes to the issue of state-specific compliance requirements.
IncFile does not handle requirements like publication because as they told us over the phone, publication requirements “need to be taken care of with the state directly.” It’s a bit disappointing, especially considering that quite a few of their competitors do offer this service. For what it’s worth, Incorporate.com does not offer assistance with publication requirements either.
That said, if you need an LLC service that also helps with New York publication requirements, ZenBusiness is worth looking into. For more information on the best New York LLC publication services, check out our full guide on this topic.
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While IncFile avoids upsells for the most part, Incorporate.com makes several attempts to sell you its registered agent service.
In addition, Incorporate.com’s LLC service package selection screen looks like their annual report service and online compliance tool are included features. However, if you read the fine print, you’ll see that you can only access these features if you also purchase registered agent service.
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Let’s just say that neither of these companies excels when it comes to refund policies. Incorporate.com has a rather vague policy that makes it difficult to tell if they ever provide refunds or not.
Check out how they describe it in their own words: “If you cancel your order before we have submitted it to a federal, state, or local office, Incorporate.com will refund the total amount paid for such order less a service fee. If you cancel your order after we have already submitted it, we will use our discretion to determine what portion, if any, we will refund.”
IncFile’s refund policy isn’t exactly an advantage either, as they only provide refunds if you request one before they send money to your state government, which they say is usually within 24 hours. Even then, they charge a $30 processing fee. After they send your payment to the state, there are no refunds for any reason.
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This category is essentially a toss-up because both Incorporate.com and IncFile base their turnaround times on the ability of each state to process LLC formations. One service or the other might be a couple of days faster in a few isolated states, but for the most part, they are equal when it comes to turnaround times.
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You certainly can, and quite a few people do form their own LLCs without assistance. However, the DIY route doesn’t provide the same peace of mind that we get from hiring a professional service to form our LLC. Additionally, because each state has its own rules and regulations for LLC formations, it can be a hassle just to figure out what your state requires.
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The biggest advantage Incorporate.com has is its experience. Incorporate.com has processed 750,000+ business formations, and they’ve also been open for more than a century.
IncFile has many advantages, but the most significant one is probably its pricing and features. IncFile offers their clients free business formation services.
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Both of these companies provide plenty of ongoing compliance assistance, but their pricing for doing so is another sharp contrast between them. As we’ve discussed, IncFile includes a year of registered agent service with each of their formation packages, and this feature costs $119 per year after that. IncFile also provides annual report service at a rate of $88 (plus state fee).
Incorporate.com also sells registered agent services, but they don’t include it in any of their formation packages, and they charge $235 per year for it. They have annual report service available as well, but again the $150 annual fee is much more expensive than IncFile.
In Conclusion
IncFile and Incorporate.com are two of the most popular LLC formation services available, and they both have plenty of strong attributes.
We wouldn’t blame you for preferring one over the other — either way, you’re using one of the best companies in the industry.
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