BusinessAnywhere Pricing 2026: The Formation Is Free, the Stack Is Not

BusinessAnywhere leads with a number that is genuinely true and almost completely uninformative: formation costs $0.

So does Bizee’s entry package. So does ZenBusiness. So does LegalZoom. The formation fee stopped being where this industry makes money several years ago, which means comparing services on it tells you nothing about what you will actually pay.

The money in this category is in the recurring layer, and BusinessAnywhere has an unusual amount of it because it sells more services than a conventional formation company. That is the point of the product and it is also the thing you need to price properly before you sign up.

Here is what is published, what the recurring stack actually costs, and the specific kind of founder for whom that stack is worth paying for. I run Ecommerce Paradise from Bali on a Wyoming LLC, so this is a purchase I have made rather than a category I am summarising.

What Is Actually Published

Service	Published price	Basis
Company formation	$0 plus state filing fees	One-time
Registered agent	From $147 per year	Annual, recurring
Virtual mailbox, Basic	$25 per month, or $20 per month billed annually	Recurring
Virtual mailbox, Premium	$40 per month, or $30 per month billed annually	Recurring
Virtual mailbox, Advanced	$85 per month, or $65 per month billed annually	Recurring
Business dissolution	From $197	One-time

Two details in that table are easy to skim past and both cost money.

The monthly virtual mailbox plans carry a $25 sign-up fee. The annual plans do not. So Basic on monthly billing is $325 in your first year and $240 on annual billing, which makes the annual discount larger than the headline 25 percent suggests once the sign-up fee is included.

The registered agent price carries an asterisk on the vendor’s own page, reading “as low as $147 per year.” I could not resolve what the asterisk qualifies, and “as low as” language in this category usually signals either a state-dependent rate or a first-year rate. Ask before you buy, and specifically ask what it renews at, because in this category the renewal question is where the surprises live.

Form a US company without living in the US

No US residency or citizenship required, formation at $0 plus state fees, with the registered agent and address handled in the same dashboard.

See BusinessAnywhere →

The Virtual Mailbox Is the Real Line Item

For most people buying this product, the mailbox costs more than everything else combined, and it is the tier decision worth spending five minutes on.

All three tiers include unlimited incoming mail and packages, unlimited mail scanning, and junk mail filtering. That is unusual. A lot of virtual mailbox providers meter scans and then charge per item once you pass the allowance, which turns a predictable subscription into a variable one. Unlimited scanning removes an entire category of bill surprise, and if you have ever been metered on scans you will recognise how much that is worth.

What separates the tiers is recipient count, not features. Basic covers up to two mail recipients, Premium up to five, Advanced up to twenty.

A recipient is a name that can legally receive mail at the address. A solo operator with one LLC needs one, possibly two if you want mail addressed to you personally as well as to the company. That is Basic at $240 a year on annual billing.

You need Premium or Advanced when you have multiple entities, a business partner, or family members receiving mail at the same address. If you are a single-member LLC with no partner, paying $360 a year for Premium is buying three recipient slots you will never use.

Forwarding is priced separately at $2 packing plus carrier cost, worldwide. That is a fair structure and it is worth modelling if you actually need physical mail rather than scans. If you are somewhere with expensive inbound courier rates, and Indonesia certainly is, the carrier cost is the number that matters and the $2 packing fee is a rounding error.

The Comparison Nobody Runs Properly

Here is the comparison that matters, and it is not the one the formation-fee tables show you.

Compare the annual recurring cost of the whole stack you actually need, not the one-time formation fee. For a US-resident solo operator who wants a registered agent and a business address, that looks like this.

Service	Registered agent	Business address	Annual recurring
BusinessAnywhere	From $147/yr	Mailbox from $240/yr	From $387
Northwest Registered Agent	$125/yr	Included in the agent fee	$125

That is a three-fold difference in recurring cost, and I am the one who earns a commission on both links, so let me be direct about what it means.

Northwest’s registered agent page states a $125 per year price for a single state, dropping to $100 per year per state at five or more states, and lists a free business address and free mail scanning as part of that fee. If your requirement is a registered agent and a business address for a single-state US LLC, that is a materially cheaper route and worth pricing before you commit. Harbor Compliance is cheaper again on the agent alone, at $99 for the first year renewing at $149, or $297 prepaid for three years which holds the rate at $99, though it does not advertise a bundled business address in the way Northwest does.

The honest qualifier, because I have not verified the limits and you should not assume equivalence: Northwest’s page says “free mail scanning” without publishing a volume cap, and an address folded into an agent service is not automatically the same product as a full virtual mailbox with unlimited scanning, worldwide forwarding, and multiple named recipients. Confirm the scan volume and the forwarding terms directly before treating the two as interchangeable. What I can say is that the cheaper option deserves a phone call before you commit to the more expensive one.

Where BusinessAnywhere Genuinely Earns Its Price

The above is the argument against paying more. Here is the argument for it, and it is a real one for a specific reader.

BusinessAnywhere states plainly that you do not need to live in the US or be a US citizen to form a company through it, and says its users come from over 80 countries. That is the whole product. Formation, registered agent, virtual mailbox, EIN and ITIN applications, online notary, and introductions to banking partners, assembled for someone who has no US address and no US presence to start from.

If you are a non-resident founder, that bundle is not a convenience, it is the removal of a genuine blocker. The sequence that stops most non-residents is not formation, it is everything after it: getting an EIN without a Social Security number, getting a bank account without walking into a branch, and having a US address that is not a friend’s spare room. A service that handles all of those in one dashboard is solving the actual problem.

If you are a US citizen with a US address, none of that applies to you. You can get an EIN yourself by applying directly through the IRS at no cost, you can open a business bank account with your existing banking relationship, and your address problem is a registered agent problem rather than a residency problem. The bundle is priced for a difficulty you do not have.

That is the single clearest split in this decision, and it matters more than any feature comparison. Non-resident founders should look hard at this product. US-resident founders should price the cheaper single-purpose alternatives first and only come back if the bundle solves something specific.

Registered agent and business address in one fee

If you are a US resident who needs an agent and an address together in one fee, $125 a year for a single state is the number to measure against.

Check Northwest pricing →

What This Costs Over Three Years

Formation is a one-time event and the recurring layer runs forever, so three years is the honest planning window. State filing fees sit on top of every figure below and vary widely, from under $50 in some states to several hundred in others, so they are excluded here rather than guessed at.

Setup	Year 1	Years 2 and 3	Three-year total
BusinessAnywhere, agent plus Basic mailbox, annual billing	$387	$387 each	$1,161
BusinessAnywhere, agent plus Basic mailbox, monthly billing	$472	$447 each	$1,366
BusinessAnywhere, agent plus Premium mailbox, annual billing	$507	$507 each	$1,521
BusinessAnywhere, registered agent only	$147	$147 each	$441

Three things fall out of that table.

Annual billing on the mailbox saves $205 over three years against monthly, because you avoid the $25 sign-up fee and the 25 percent monthly premium. If you are confident you will keep the address for a year, take the annual plan.

The recipient upgrade costs $360 over three years. If you cannot name the second, third, fourth and fifth person receiving mail at that address today, you do not need Premium.

And the mailbox is roughly 62 percent of the total. If you have another way to solve the address problem, that is where the savings are, not in the formation fee everybody argues about.

The Address Question Deserves Its Own Answer

A lot of people buy a virtual mailbox to solve a problem that has a cheaper answer, and a lot of others skip it when they genuinely need one. Both mistakes are common.

You need a real business address, not just a registered agent, when your address will be public and used commercially: on your website, on supplier dealer applications, on invoices, on Google Business Profile, on payment processor applications. A registered agent address is for receiving legal service of process, and some agents will not accept general business mail at all.

You do not need a separate mailbox if your agent’s fee already includes a usable business address, if you have a US address you are comfortable making public, or if your business genuinely receives no physical mail. Plenty of software and service businesses fall in the third category and pay for scanning that never happens.

For high-ticket dropshipping specifically, you almost certainly do need it. Supplier dealer applications ask for a business address, and a residential address on a wholesale application is one of the fastest ways to get declined. I have written about this at length in my guide to getting approved with industrial dropshipping suppliers, because the paperwork stage is where most people wash out.

If you are weighing the address question on its own, my roundup of the best virtual mailbox services compares the category properly. For the legal side of holding a business address while living outside the US, see business address options for digital nomads.

What the Price Does Not Cover

State filing fees. Every figure here excludes them and they are not small. Wyoming and New Mexico sit at the cheap end, California and Massachusetts at the expensive end, and the annual report or franchise tax obligations differ just as much as the formation fee. Pick the state on the ongoing obligation rather than the one-time filing cost.

The IRS guidance on LLCs is worth reading before you form anything, because how the entity is classified for federal tax purposes is a decision with consequences and no formation service makes it for you.

Your annual report. Most states require one and most services sell filing it as an add-on. Missing it can put your entity out of good standing, which is a problem you discover at the worst possible moment, usually when a supplier or a bank runs a check on you.

Tax filing. BusinessAnywhere sells bookkeeping and tax filing separately. Nothing in the formation or agent fee touches your return. If you are a US citizen living abroad, the filing obligations are their own subject and I have covered them in how to file taxes as an expat.

The entity choice itself. Whether an LLC is even the right structure is a decision made before you reach a pricing page, and the Small Business Administration guidance on choosing a business structure is a reasonable free starting point. Formation services sell you the filing, not the judgement.

Legal advice. None of these companies are law firms and none of them are telling you whether an LLC is the right entity, whether your state choice is sensible, or whether your operating agreement protects you. For anything with real money attached, that conversation is with a lawyer and it is worth what it costs.

Which Kind of Founder You Are

Non-resident founder with no US presence. This is the product’s actual buyer. Formation, EIN or ITIN, agent, address, and banking introductions in one place, with no requirement to be in the country. The stack cost is high in isolation and reasonable against the alternative, which is assembling four vendors who each assume you already have a US address.

US citizen living abroad, which is me. Closer call. You have a Social Security number, so the EIN is free and takes minutes. What you actually need is an agent and an address, which is the case where the cheaper single-purpose options compete hard. I would price Northwest first and buy the bundle only if the notary, the ITIN help, or the multi-entity dashboard is doing real work for you.

US resident, single state, one LLC. Price the cheaper options first. Your problem is a registered agent and possibly an address, and there are services that solve exactly that for a third of the recurring cost. Come back to a bundle when you have a second entity or an actual mail volume problem.

Multiple entities across several states. The dashboard argument gets stronger, and so does the recipient count on the mailbox. Model it properly on your real entity count rather than on the entry price, because per-state agent fees are where multi-entity operators get surprised.

Not yet trading. Form the entity, get the agent, and stop there. Add the mailbox when something actually needs to be mailed to you. Buying a $240 a year address before you have a supplier or a customer is optimising a problem you have not got.

Common Questions

Is formation really free? The service fee is $0. State filing fees are not, they are mandatory, and they are paid to the state rather than the company. So the honest answer is that formation costs whatever your state charges, which is the same for every service in this category.

What does the asterisk on the registered agent price mean? The published figure is “as low as $147 per year” and the qualifier is not explained on the page. Assume it is state-dependent or introductory until told otherwise, and get the renewal figure in writing before you commit.

Can I use the virtual mailbox address as my registered agent address? They are different legal functions and you should not assume one substitutes for the other. A registered agent must be available during business hours to accept service of process. Ask the vendor directly rather than inferring it, because getting this wrong puts your entity’s standing at risk.

Do I need this if I already have a US LLC? Only if your current agent or address arrangement is failing you. Switching registered agents is straightforward and usually involves a state filing with a small fee, so the switching cost is low if the recurring saving is real.

What happens if I stop paying? The agent service lapses, and an entity without a registered agent falls out of good standing in most states. That is the one line item in this stack you cannot quietly cancel, which is worth knowing before you treat it as discretionary.

Is the annual mailbox plan worth committing to? If you will keep the address twelve months, yes, comfortably. You save the $25 sign-up fee and 25 percent of the monthly rate. If you are testing whether you need an address at all, take the month and accept the sign-up fee as the cost of finding out.