Two registered agent services, two very different pricing models, and one question that decides which is cheaper for you. Northwest Registered Agent charges $125 a year for a single state. Registered Agents Inc charges $200 a year per state. On the surface that looks like an easy call, a $75 gap in Northwest’s favor, and for most ecommerce operators it is. But the $200 includes something the $125 does not, and if you were going to pay for that thing anyway the math changes.
I have formed multiple LLCs over the fifteen years I have been building high-ticket dropshipping stores, and I have used a registered agent for every single one of them. This comparison is written for a specific reader: someone running an online store who needs a registered agent, does not want their home address on a public state filing, and wants to know which of these two is the better place to put that money. If you are earlier than that and still figuring out the entity itself, start with my complete legal and financial foundation checklist and come back here once you know what state you are filing in.
Everything below is priced from what each company publishes on its own site as of September 2026. Where a company does not publish a number, I say so instead of guessing, because guessing is how bad pricing advice spreads. This is general information about how two services are priced, not legal or tax advice, and entity and compliance rules vary by state.
Keep Your Home Address Off Your Public State Filing
Northwest puts its own address on every public field it can, charges a flat $125 a year, and states that it does not sell your data. Formation is $39 plus your state fee.
The Published Numbers, Side by Side
Here is what each company actually puts on its own pricing pages. Where a company publishes nothing, the cell says so rather than carrying an estimate.
| Feature | Northwest Registered Agent | Registered Agents Inc |
|---|---|---|
| LLC formation fee | $39 + state fee | Not published |
| Registered agent, one state | $125/year | $200/year |
| Registered agent, 5+ states | $100/state/year | No volume rate published |
| Annual report filing | Sold separately | Included in the $200 |
| First year of agent service | Not published whether included | Not published whether included |
| Address used on public filings | Northwest’s own | Registered Agents Inc’s own |
| Support model | Corporate Guides, phone and email | Local offices in all 50 states |
| Best for | One LLC, one state, owner files own report | Multi-state portfolios where deadlines get missed |
Two things in that table matter more than the rest. The first is that Registered Agents Inc bundles annual report filing into the $200. The second is that they do not publish a formation price at all, which means you cannot budget the first year of an LLC with them without contacting sales.
The $75 Question
Strip everything else away and the recurring decision is $125 against $200. That is $75 a year, or $375 in agent fees across a five-year hold. For a store doing real revenue that is not a number that should drive the decision on its own, but it is real money and it deserves an honest answer rather than a shrug.
The answer depends entirely on what you do about your annual report. Most states require an LLC to file an annual or biennial report, though a handful do not, and the deadline, the fee and the form are different in every one of them. The state charges its own fee on top of whatever anyone charges to prepare it. Wyoming, to take a common choice for ecommerce operators, publishes its requirements on the Wyoming Secretary of State annual report page, and the filing itself takes about twenty minutes online once a year.
If you are going to do that yourself, and most single-LLC store owners should, then Registered Agents Inc is charging you $75 a year for a service you are not going to use. Northwest at $125 is straightforwardly the better deal, and the decision is over.
If you are the kind of operator who has already missed a compliance deadline once, or you are running entities in three or four states and genuinely lose track, then the bundled filing has real value. Late annual reports carry state penalties in most states and, in the worst case, administrative dissolution of the LLC, though the grace period and the penalty vary. Paying $75 a year to have someone else own that deadline is not a bad trade if you know yourself well enough to know you will not do it.
What Northwest Actually Gives You for $125
Northwest’s pitch is privacy, and unlike a lot of privacy marketing in this category it is specific. Northwest says it puts its own address into every public field the state will let it use, not just the registered agent line. That means the address on your Articles of Organization, the organizer line, and the agent line are all theirs rather than yours.
For a dropshipping operator working out of an apartment, that is the whole point. Your state business filing is a public record, permanently searchable, and it is one of the first things a supplier, a competitor, or an unhappy customer will find. I have written about why this matters at length in my guide on what high-ticket dropshipping actually involves, because the supplier relationship is where your business address gets scrutinized hardest.
The second thing you get is the Corporate Guide support model. Northwest describes this as assigning you named people rather than a ticket queue. In practice that means when a state sends something you do not understand, you can call and get a human who knows your file. That is worth more than it sounds like when you are three time zones away from your state of formation, which as a nomad I usually am.
Northwest also does not upsell aggressively at checkout, which is genuinely unusual. The free and cheap formation tiers elsewhere in this category tend to make their money at checkout instead. Northwest charges $39 and mostly leaves you alone.
The multi-state pricing is the underrated part. At five or more states Northwest drops to $100 per state per year. If you are running separate LLCs per store, which some operators do for liability separation, that discount compounds. Five states with Northwest is $500 a year. Five states with Registered Agents Inc is $1,000 a year at their published per-state rate, since they do not publish a volume discount.
What Registered Agents Inc Gives You for $200
The annual report inclusion is the headline and it is a real feature, not a marketing line. Compliance filing is the single most common way a small LLC gets into trouble, and it is not because owners do not care. It is because the deadline lands eleven months after you last thought about your entity.
Registered Agents Inc says it operates its own offices in all fifty states rather than contracting the address out. For most operators that is a distinction without a difference, but if you are in a regulated category where the physical agent location gets scrutinized, it matters.
Where they lose me is the formation pricing. They do not publish it. You can find the $200 agent fee on their site without difficulty, but the cost to actually form the LLC through them is a conversation, not a number. I said the same thing in my full Registered Agents Inc review and it remains my main reservation about the company. A vendor that will quote you the recurring fee but not the entry fee is asking you to start a relationship without knowing what it costs.
For an ecommerce operator who wants to price a formation before committing, that alone is usually enough to send them to Northwest at a published $39 instead.
Skip the Sales Call and Price It Yourself
Northwest publishes every price you need to compare: $39 to form, $125 a year for the agent, $100 per state at five or more. No quote required.
Running the Five-Year Numbers
Here is the part most comparisons in this category get wrong, so I want to be careful about the assumptions.
Neither company publishes whether the first year of registered agent service is included when you form through them. Northwest does not publish whether the first year of registered agent service is included with the $39 formation package. Registered Agents Inc does not publish a formation price at all, so the question does not even arise cleanly. Every figure below therefore charges for all five years of agent service, which is the conservative reading.
Northwest, one state, five years: $39 to form, plus five years at $125, comes to $664. Registered Agents Inc, one state, five years: the formation cost is unknown, plus five years at $200, which is $1,000 over the five years before whatever the formation runs.
The gap is at least $336 over five years once Northwest’s $39 formation fee is counted, and more than that once you add Registered Agents Inc’s unpublished formation charge. On agent fees alone, ignoring formation entirely, it is $375. Against either number, Registered Agents Inc has covered five annual report filings and Northwest has not.
So the break-even depends on a number Registered Agents Inc will not give you. If having someone file five annual reports is worth more than $336 plus whatever they charge to form the LLC, they are the better buy. You cannot actually run that comparison until you call them and get a formation quote. If you would have filed the reports yourself in twenty minutes a year, it is not close either way.
For a portfolio, run it again at five states. Northwest is $500 a year at the volume rate. Registered Agents Inc is $1,000 a year at their per-state rate and includes five compliance filings. That $500 annual gap buys a lot of calendar reminders.
Where Both of Them Sit in the Wider Market
Neither of these is the cheapest registered agent available, and it is worth knowing that before you decide. MyCompanyWorks publishes the lowest renewal I have verified at $119 a year. Northwest is next at $125. Bizee renews at $149 after giving you the first year free with a formation package.
If your only criterion is the lowest recurring number, MyCompanyWorks at $119 wins and you should stop reading. It is six dollars a year cheaper than Northwest.
I still send most people to Northwest anyway, and I want to be honest that this is a judgment call rather than an arithmetic one. The privacy handling is better, the support model is better, and six dollars a year is not a real difference to a business that is going to do six figures. But if you are optimizing purely on price, I am not going to pretend the numbers say what they do not.
The one thing I would not do is pick a registered agent on the strength of a free first year. Bizee gives you year one free with a formation package and then charges $149, which is more than Northwest’s $125 though still less than Registered Agents Inc’s $200. The free year is worth $149 exactly once, and after that you pay Northwest’s price plus $24 every year unless you move.
The Compliance Trap Nobody Warns You About
Whichever way you go, understand what a registered agent does and does not do. The agent receives service of process and official state mail on your behalf. That is the legal function, and both of these companies perform it competently.
What the agent does not do, unless you specifically buy it, is keep your entity in good standing. That is on you. The federal side is separate again, and if you have not sorted your EIN yet you can get one free directly from the IRS through the EIN application in about fifteen minutes, provided you have an SSN or ITIN. Without one you file Form SS-4 by fax or mail and it takes longer. Either way, do not pay a formation service to do it for you.
The entity choice itself is worth getting right before you worry about who receives your mail. The Small Business Administration’s guide to business structures is the clearest free explanation of why an LLC usually beats a sole proprietorship for a store that holds inventory risk or takes customer payments.
One more thing that catches ecommerce sellers specifically. Shipping into a state is not the same as doing business in it. You need a registered agent in your state of formation and in any state where you have foreign qualified to do business. Crossing a state’s sales tax economic nexus threshold creates a sales tax registration obligation, which is a separate question from whether you have to qualify to do business there. Whether your activity requires foreign qualification is state specific and worth putting to a professional. Plenty of services will happily sell you fifty registered agents. Almost nobody needs them.
My Honest Pick
For the overwhelming majority of ecommerce operators reading this, Northwest Registered Agent is the right answer. One LLC, one state, $39 to form and $125 a year after that, with the privacy handling that is the actual reason you are hiring an agent in the first place. File your own annual report. It takes twenty minutes and the state charges the same fee either way.
Registered Agents Inc earns its $200 in one specific situation: you are running entities in multiple states, you have already learned the hard way that you will not track those deadlines, and you would rather buy the problem away than solve it. That is a legitimate reason to pay more and I am not going to talk anyone out of it.
What I would not do is choose Registered Agents Inc for a first single-member LLC without getting the formation price in writing first. An unpublished entry fee on a service you are going to renew annually is the kind of thing that looks fine in month one and irritating in month thirteen.
If you are still deciding on the store itself rather than the entity behind it, the entity can wait a week. My high-ticket niches list is free and will do more for your business this month than either of these companies will. And when you are ready to source, my step-by-step supplier guide covers the part where having a real business address starts to matter.
Ready to Form the Entity Behind Your Store?
$39 plus your state fee, a flat $125 a year for the agent, real people on the phone, and no data selling. File your own annual report and keep the difference.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Registered Agents Inc worth $75 a year more than Northwest?
Only if you will actually use the included annual report filing. Registered Agents Inc bundles compliance filing into its $200 per state per year. Northwest sells that separately and charges $125 a year for the agent alone. If you file your own annual report, which takes about twenty minutes once a year, you are paying $75 for nothing.
What does Registered Agents Inc charge to form an LLC?
They do not publish it. The $200 per year registered agent fee is on their site, but the formation cost is not, which means you cannot price a first year without contacting them. Northwest publishes $39 plus your state filing fee.
Which is cheaper for multiple states?
Northwest, and the gap widens with volume. Northwest drops to $100 per state per year at five or more states, so five states is $500. Registered Agents Inc publishes no volume rate, so five states is $1,000 a year at their standard price, though that thousand includes five annual report filings.
Do I get the first year of registered agent service free with either one?
Neither company publishes an answer. Northwest does not publish whether the first year of registered agent service is included with its $39 formation package. Registered Agents Inc does not publish formation pricing at all. Assume you are paying for every year and treat it as a bonus if you are not.
Can I switch registered agents later?
Yes. You file a change of agent form with whichever office handles business filings in your state, usually but not always the Secretary of State, and pay a filing fee that varies by state. It is not a decision you are locked into, so do not agonize over it. Pick one, get the LLC formed, and move on to building the store.
Do I need a registered agent in every state I ship to?
No. You need one in your state of formation and in any state where you have registered to do business. Shipping products into a state does not by itself create that obligation. Check your specific situation before paying for agents you do not need.
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If you want the whole business built for you rather than assembled piece by piece, my done-for-you store service handles the entity, the site, and the supplier approvals together. And if you are just getting oriented, everything starts at Ecommerce Paradise.
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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