Bizee Alternative — Bizee vs Mainstay Filing

Bizee sells three formation tiers, all one-time payments rather than annual plans: Basic at $0 plus the state fee for the core filing, Standard (their recommended tier) at $199 plus the state fee, and Premium (their "best value" tier) at $399 plus the state fee. Whichever tier is chosen, the registered agent comes bundled free for somewhere between three and twelve months, depending on the package, before it converts to a standalone service billed at $149/year.

Beyond formation and the agent, Bizee's add-on list includes a confirmed $70 EIN/Tax ID service, plus a longer menu of items whose pricing is either dynamic or simply not published statically: a virtual address (billed monthly, price set at checkout), an assumed-business-name/DBA filing, a business-license research package, trademark registration, a "Corporate LLC Kit," articles of amendment, foreign qualification, a certificate of good standing, an S-corp tax-election filing, a registered-agent change, reinstatement, and dissolution service. A free tax-and-accounting consult is offered as a lead-generation call rather than a priced service.

That's a genuinely long list of individually orderable products, and it reflects a real business built around a la carte pricing rather than a single bundled service — the difference from Mainstay isn't that one menu is longer than the other, it's that Bizee has a menu at all for things Mainstay simply includes, like guided formation paperwork, or doesn't sell as an upsell, like an operating agreement.

Bizee's site describes its annual-report service as a "Transparent Flat Fee — No Surprises," but the actual number is computed dynamically after you select your entity type and state rather than published as a static figure anywhere on the site — meaning the specific price simply couldn't be confirmed for this comparison. Combined with the registered agent's $149/yr renewal once the bundled period ends, a realistic year two lands somewhere around $150 to $300 per year for a simple single-state LLC, though that upper bound carries genuine uncertainty because the annual-report figure itself is unconfirmed rather than estimated from a published price.

Mainstay's $199/yr already includes both pieces — the registered agent for the full year and the annual report, prepared and filed — as one flat number that's the same before you start as it is after you've already paid it.

Bizee is founder-led and has operated independently since 2004, with more than a million customers served under its Incfile and Bizee names combined — a real, long track record in this category. The one-time formation-tier structure genuinely sets it apart from ZenBusiness and LegalZoom's annually-renewing tiers, and none of its formation packages carry a bundled monthly trial that silently converts, which is a meaningfully less aggressive pattern than several other names in this comparison series. Their Trustpilot rating — 4.7 stars across more than 25,000 reviews — is strong, and they offer real human support, including in Spanish, which several competitors don't. For an owner who specifically doesn't want a subscription clock starting the moment they file, and would rather pay once for the paperwork itself and deal with the agent and report separately later, Bizee's structure is a deliberate, defensible choice rather than an accident of pricing.

Bizee's own marketing leans on the word "transparent" for its annual-report pricing, and it may well be exactly that once you're in their checkout flow — but a number that only appears after you've selected your state and entity type isn't the same as a number published on the page you're reading before you decide. The same is true of their virtual-address pricing, which is also dynamic rather than static. Neither is a hidden fee in the sense of a surprise charge — both are disclosed before payment — but neither can be verified or compared here the way a number printed directly on a pricing page can.

This is worth naming plainly rather than guessing at a figure: where Bizee's own site doesn't publish a number, this page doesn't either.

If you specifically want a one-time formation payment with no recurring tier fee sitting behind it, and you're comfortable getting the annual-report number at checkout rather than reading it up front, Bizee's structure is a reasonable, moderately priced choice among the names in this comparison set. Their Spanish- language support and long operating history are also real advantages for some owners, especially if a one-time formation payment matters more to you than knowing the full annual number in advance.

For anyone who'd rather see the whole annual number — agent and report together — spelled out before committing to anything, that's the specific gap the flat $199/yr line closes. There's no tool to run and no state-and-entity form to fill out first; the number on this page is the number, before you've paid anything at all.