Year One Free, Year Two Unquoted: The Case for a Printed Price

Our position is not neutral and we will not perform neutrality: IL Registered Agent.org sells the Illinois service this page recommends. The claim that does not turn on our judgment concerns a number absent from another company's website, and you are welcome to go looking for it yourself.

The Free Year Is Genuinely Free

Twelve months of agent service arrive at zero cost inside Inc Authority's formation packages. We hunted for the catch, an activation charge, a truncated term, a clawback on cancellation, and turned up none of them. For a new Illinois company that removes a mandatory expense from the first year's budget, and refusing it out of suspicion would be silly.

The Renewal Is Not in Print

What we could not locate, reading Inc Authority's published material in July 2026, is what year two costs. The tiered package descriptions stop short of it. The answers section leaves it alone. The front page says nothing. Everything about the presentation points to a figure that appears during checkout or on a call with a representative.

We are not going to guess at it. Inventing a competitor's renewal rate would demolish this page's single argument, which is that a stated price beats an unstated one. That argument survives on structure by itself:

• An Illinois LLC needs an agent every year it remains registered, without exception.
• The recurring rate, not the introductory one, is therefore the real cost of the service.
• A rate you cannot read before ordering leaves you with a comparison you cannot finish.

Both of Our Numbers Are Published

Year one, $99. Every year after, $99. Both sit on our pricing page, and reading them costs you neither an email address nor a started cart.

The fee buys an Illinois street address serving as your registered office, everything served on you scanned the day it lands and emailed straight out, permanent storage of those documents in your portal, and a prompt before the anniversary-month report window opens. Checkout holds one item.

Nor is $99 the smallest figure here. BetterLegal's rate is $90 a year. Ours belongs to the low band of published Illinois pricing and is legible in advance, which is the entire point of the section above.

If You Switch From Inc Authority, Illinois Charges $25

Form LLC-1.36/1.37, a $25 fee, and the Illinois Secretary of State. The single rule to respect is order: appoint the new agent, then file, so your record never shows the position empty. Our change of agent instructions cover the rest.

Why the Unpriced Year Matters More in Illinois Than You Might Think

A cheap exit makes a bad renewal recoverable, and $25 qualifies as cheap. But an exit is a backstop, not a plan, and a backstop is what you reach for after the right first step got skipped. The right first step is to ask Inc Authority in writing what the renewal costs, before any order goes in. If a figure comes back and you like it, buy from them with our blessing. If it only surfaces once your card is on the screen, that is its own answer about the years ahead.

Being deliberate matters here because Illinois punishes drift. Your LLC owes Form LLC-50.1 and $75 before the first of its anniversary month, a date the state assigns to your company rather than announcing to everyone at once. Sixty days late adds $100. At 180 days delinquent the Secretary of State begins administrative dissolution under 805 ILCS 180/35-25, and unwinding that requires a reinstatement filing the online system will not accept. The whole chain begins with a notice nobody read, which is precisely the failure a registered agent exists to prevent. Choose that agent on terms you can see, and choose while you are paying attention rather than while an unexpected invoice sits in front of you.

Order Here

The published rate of every Illinois provider we track, in one table: the annual comparison.