Long story short: I run a small online publishing company (ebooks, a couple of niche sites). I set it up as an LLC a few years back and originally just used myself as the registered agent. That got old fast once I moved twice and started getting service of process mail forwarded to my house. Switched to Northwest Registered Agent about 14 months ago. Main reason was price (their $39/year renewal) and they don't upsell you on a bunch of compliance junk. The mail scanning in their dashboard works fine for my needs. Curious if anyone else here uses them for a content business and what your experience has been.
Registered Agent
I used Northwest Registered Agent for my online publishing company
I've used them for two entities, one of which is a small publishing imprint. No complaints. The renewal price has stayed the same for me, which is more than I can say for the last company I was with.
Did you ever actually get served paperwork at your house? I keep hearing people say they want a commercial RA "just in case" but I've never met anyone who actually had it happen.
No, never got served. It was more about the address on public filings. I didn't love my home address being attached to the LLC in the state's database. Moving twice was the other factor, I didn't want to file address changes each time.
The address privacy thing is the real benefit, in my opinion. The annual fee is basically the cost of not having your house in a public database.
I went with a different outfit because Northwest's mail forwarding costs extra per piece if you want it physically forwarded. For a publishing company that might be getting contracts or checks by mail, run the numbers first. The free digital scan was enough for me, but it depends on your volume.
This. We get royalty checks and a few print contracts sent to the RA address, and the physical forwarding fees added up to more than I expected in year one. Not a dealbreaker but worth knowing going in.
Do they actually forward checks or is it scan only? I feel like most of these RA services won't touch a check.
They'll forward, it's just a per-item charge plus shipping. They don't deposit anything obviously. We mostly switched to having royalties go direct deposit, so it's less of an issue now.
One thing nobody's mentioned: their customer service. I had to call about a biennial report notice that didn't make sense and got a real person who actually understood the filing, not a script reader. That was the thing that made me stay.
Interesting. I had the opposite experience with their support, took two days to get an email reply about a missing scan. Maybe it's hit or miss.
Has your renewal price actually stayed at $39? I've seen people say the price went up on them at renewal. Not trying to start something, genuinely asking before I move my second entity over.