The headline price of LLC formation has collapsed to zero. Both Tailor Brands and LegalZoom will file your articles of organization for $0 plus whatever your state charges. That fact tells you almost nothing useful, because neither company makes money on the filing anymore.
LegalZoom moved formation to a free product in 2023 as a defensive move against AI-driven commoditization, then rebuilt its economics around subscriptions.
Its Q2 2025 numbers show the result: $120 million in subscription revenue against $73 million in transaction revenue, with average revenue per subscription unit of $263. Tailor Brands arrived at a similar place from the opposite direction — it started as a logo generator in 2014 and added LLC formation in February 2022, largely as an on-ramp to its branding subscriptions.
So the real question is not which company files paperwork more cheaply. It is which one’s renewal structure you can live with for the next five years.
Company DNA
LegalZoom
Founded in March 2001 by Brian Liu, Brian Lee, Edward Hartman, and Robert Shapiro, LegalZoom is the incumbent. It has formed roughly 4.8 million businesses, went public on Nasdaq in June 2021 at $28 a share, and now trades as a small-cap component of the Russell 2000 — a substantial markdown from its roughly $7 billion debut valuation.
That trajectory matters to customers. The company has cut staff twice in recent years: 15% in August 2024, roughly a month after installing CEO Jeffrey Stibel, and another 5% in early 2026, attributed to replacing manual processes with automation. In February 2025 it bought Formation Nation, owner of Inc Authority and Nevada Corporate Headquarters, for $49.3 million cash plus stock — a segmentation play that lets LegalZoom keep its own brand premium while sending budget buyers elsewhere in the portfolio.
LegalZoom is built for the customer who wants a legal document company with lawyers attached. It survived the unauthorized-practice-of-law fights of the 2000s — the Missouri class action settled in 2011, the North Carolina Bar dispute resolved in 2015 — and now sells attorney access as a subscription product.
Tailor Brands
Tailor Brands launched out of TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2014, founded by Yali Saar, Nadav Shatz, and Tom Lahat. It raised a $50 million Series C led by GoDaddy in July 2021 and remains private. Its original product was an automated logo maker, and the branding DNA is still visible everywhere in the product.
Tailor Brands is built for the solo founder who wants a business name, a logo, a domain, a one-page website, and an LLC — in that order of emotional priority. If you already have a brand and a designer, you are paying for a bundle you will not open.
One item worth flagging before going further. In May 2025, competitor ZenBusiness challenged Tailor Brands’ advertising claims for its LLC formation service before the BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (Case #7435). Tailor Brands permanently discontinued the challenged claims rather than defend them, and also removed a “Show more” link from its purchase flow. NAD never ruled on the merits. Voluntary discontinuance is not a finding of wrongdoing, but withdrawing claims rather than substantiating them is a data point.
Pricing Breakdown
Both companies price everything “plus state fees,” which run roughly $40 to $500 depending on where you file — $40 in Kentucky, $70 in California, $300 in Texas, $500 in Massachusetts. Neither includes them. Neither should be blamed for that.
| Tailor Brands | LegalZoom | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Lite — $0, one-time | Basic — $0, one-time |
| Free tier includes | Filing, bookkeeping trial, coaching content | Articles of organization, name check, tax consult |
| Mid tier | Essential — $199/year | Pro — $249 |
| Mid tier includes | Operating agreement, annual compliance filing, expedited processing | Operating agreement, EIN, 150+ documents, eSignatures, Wix site, attorney consults (30 days) |
| Top tier | Elite — $249/year | Premium — $299 |
| Top tier adds | Domain (1 yr), DIY website, 8 logos, social tools | Bookkeeping (6 months), invoicing, expense and mileage tracking |
| Billing model | Annual subscription, auto-renews | One-time, with embedded auto-renewing subscriptions |
| Registered agent | $199/yr, sold separately, no free year | $249/yr, sold separately, no free year |
| EIN | $99 add-on, not in any tier | Included in Pro and Premium |
The structural difference is important and easy to miss. Tailor Brands’ Essential and Elite plans are annual subscriptions — the $199 or $249 recurs. LegalZoom’s Pro and Premium are one-time charges with subscription products nested inside them: the Pro attorney plan is free for 30 days and then bills at $49 per month, and Premium’s bookkeeping is free for 180 days and then bills at $9.99 per month. Both are cancelable. Both will charge you if you forget.
What the “free” tier really costs
Take the most common real-world scenario: a single-member LLC that needs an EIN, an operating agreement, and a registered agent.
- Tailor Brands, assembled à la carte: $0 formation + $99 EIN + roughly $29–99 operating agreement (sources conflict) + $199 registered agent = $327 to $397, before state fees.
- LegalZoom Pro: $249 (EIN and operating agreement included) + $249 registered agent = $498, before state fees.
Tailor Brands is cheaper in year one on that basket. In year two, Tailor Brands Essential renews at $199 plus $199 for the agent; LegalZoom charges nothing further except the $249 agent, assuming you canceled the attorney plan. The crossover is real, and it depends entirely on whether you keep the subscription.
A note on the EIN specifically: the IRS issues them free, online, in about fifteen minutes. Paying $99 for one buys you convenience and nothing else. If a provider’s tier upgrade is justified to you mostly on the EIN, the math is worse than it looks.
Formation Speed and Efficiency
This is where both companies get vague, and where the advertising deserves the most skepticism.
Tailor Brands advertises 14 business days on Lite and “1 business day expedited” on Essential and Elite. Independent reviewers at Wolters Kluwer and ZenBusiness both describe that expedited tier as two business days. Expedited service costs $49 as a standalone add-on.
LegalZoom publishes no turnaround times at all on its LLC pricing or overview pages. Third-party estimates range from 5–14 business days to 15–20 business days depending on who you ask, and reported expedited pricing of $99 comes with contradictory claims about what it delivers. Treat every number in this paragraph as unverified.
Here is the part both companies bury. Their “processing time” measures how long they take to prepare and submit your documents — not how long your state takes to approve them. State turnaround is the actual bottleneck and it varies from same-day in Delaware to several weeks in California during backlogs. Paying $49 or $99 to shave a day off the vendor’s internal queue does nothing about the four weeks sitting behind it. Expedited service is worth buying only when your state itself offers expedited processing and the fee is being passed through.
Registered Agent Services
Every LLC needs a registered agent: a physical address in the state of formation, staffed during business hours, where lawsuits and state notices get delivered. You can serve as your own agent in every state, which puts your home address in a public database and requires you to be there on weekday afternoons.
Neither company includes it free.
That is unusual, and worth naming plainly. Northwest Registered Agent and Bizee both bundle a free first year with formation. Tailor Brands charges $199 per year and — per ZenBusiness’s review — only lets you attach the service at the time of the formation order, not buy it standalone later. LegalZoom charges $249 per year, disclosed on its own page as “Auto renews. Cancel anytime.”
The renewal problem
Tailor Brands does not publish its $199 registered agent price anywhere on its own site; its agent pages quote a generic “$99 to $300” industry range. Three independent reviews converge on $199. LegalZoom publishes $249 but states only that “the renewal rate is subject to change” — no committed renewal figure.
Neither company will guarantee you a price for year three. That is not a trivial omission. Registered agent service is the stickiest product in the category precisely because changing agents means filing a change-of-agent form with the state, paying a small fee, and remembering to do it. Providers know this.
The failure mode is worse than the price. If an agent lapses for non-payment, or a renewal notice goes to an email you abandoned, service of process gets returned undelivered. You do not find out you were sued. Default judgments entered against an LLC that never appeared are enforceable, and vacating one requires showing excusable neglect — a standard that missed subscription billing does not obviously meet. Both companies’ complaint files include renewal notices sent to stale contacts. Whoever your agent is, keep the billing email current and independent of the address that goes dark when a project stalls.
The document experience
LegalZoom is the stronger product here. Service of process gets scanned to cloud storage, emailed, and backed up with a physical postcard alert; routine mail gets scanned and emailed. Storage is unlimited. Tailor Brands does not publish comparable detail about its scanning workflow, notification tiers, or storage limits, which is itself informative.
User Experience: What You See After You Pay
Both dashboards work. Both are also sales surfaces.
Trustpilot’s own automated summary for LegalZoom flags “aggressive upselling tactics and frequent sales calls trying to push additional products immediately after registering.” That is not a cherry-picked review — it is the platform’s synthesis of 32,808 of them. The structure guarantees it: the $0 Basic tier deliberately omits the EIN, the operating agreement, and the registered agent, all of which then appear as upgrades.
Tailor Brands’ checkout has been described across multiple reviews as a sequence of upsell screens — EIN, agent, compliance, expedited — that lands the cart well above the advertised plan price. The NAD case corroborates this indirectly: removing the “Show more” link from the purchase flow was part of what the company agreed to change.
Tailor Brands’ dashboard is more visually polished, because branding is its native product. LegalZoom’s is denser and more document-oriented. Neither is a graveyard, but neither is quiet.
Customer Support Reality Check
| Tailor Brands | LegalZoom | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | (332) 286-2770 — hours not published | (888) 379-0854 — Mon–Fri 5am–7pm PT, weekends 7am–4pm PT |
| Dedicated cancellation line | No | Yes — (800) 773-0888 |
| Live chat | After login, via Help icon | During business hours |
| Email SLA | “Up to 2 business days” | Not published |
| Trustpilot | 4.8 / 5 (17,204 reviews) | 4.6 / 5 (32,808 reviews) |
| 1-star share | 10% | 8% |
| BBB | No profile found | A+, accredited since 2001; 1,440 complaints closed in 3 years |
| Reported support quality | Support rated 1.9/5 on PissedConsumer | Hour-long holds reported; some month-long silences |
Read the Trustpilot scores carefully. Both distributions are bimodal — 84–85% five-star, 8–10% one-star, almost nothing in the middle. That shape is typical of post-transaction review solicitation: happy customers get prompted at checkout, unhappy ones show up on their own weeks later when a renewal hits. The average is close to meaningless. The one-star share is the number to watch, and it is roughly one in ten for both.
LegalZoom’s BBB file is the more revealing document. Complaint themes, in rough order: auto-renewal charges after cancellation attempts, billing disputes, delayed or incomplete filings, data-entry errors by representatives, refund resistance, and renewal notices sent to stale contacts. Most complaints are marked “Answered” rather than “Resolved,” meaning the customer did not accept the response. And the company maintains a separate phone line whose only purpose is cancellations — a design decision that tells you what volume of calls it handles.
Tailor Brands has no BBB profile at all, so there is no comparable file. Note that a BBB search surfaces “Tailor Web Brands LLC,” an unrelated Connecticut company with an F rating. It is not the same business.
Additional Services
Operating agreements. Included in Tailor Brands Essential and Elite, and in LegalZoom Pro and Premium. LegalZoom sells it standalone at a reported $99. This is the document that determines what happens when a member dies, quits, or wants to sell. Single-member LLCs skip it and regret it later, because it is often the document that keeps a court from disregarding the entity.
Annual compliance. Tailor Brands includes annual compliance filing in Essential and Elite — a real reason to keep the subscription rather than a bonus. LegalZoom sells annual report filing at roughly $99 plus state fees, with larger compliance packages reported at $199–$299 per year. Missing an annual report gets your LLC administratively dissolved, which is recoverable but expensive and, during the gap, potentially fatal to liability protection. Plaintiffs’ lawyers look for exactly this. A dissolved entity with no operating agreement and commingled bank accounts is the standard fact pattern for piercing the veil, and the compliance filing is the cheapest defense against it.
Attorney access. Only LegalZoom offers it: unlimited 30-minute consults at $49 per month after the Pro trial. If you have real legal questions, this is the single largest functional gap between the two companies.
Bookkeeping. LegalZoom’s LZ Books is $9.99 per month after a 180-day inclusion in Premium. Tailor Brands’ bookkeeping trial converts to $39 per month after 30 days. Compare those two numbers before checking a box.
Banking resolutions and license research. Both list versions of these. Neither publishes reliable standalone pricing. Assume you will discover the cost at checkout.
The Verdict
Choose Tailor Brands if you are a solo founder starting from nothing — no name, no logo, no site — and you want one vendor for all of it. Elite at $249 covering the domain, website, and branding assets is defensible against buying those separately. Set a calendar reminder eleven months out to decide whether the renewal still earns its keep.
Choose LegalZoom if you have partners, real legal complexity, or an entity you expect to raise money into. The $49-per-month attorney line is the product Tailor Brands does not have, the document infrastructure is deeper, and staffed weekend phone support has value at 4pm on a Saturday when a state notice arrives.
Choose neither if all you need is a filing and an agent. Both companies’ registered agent pricing — $199 and $249, with no free year and no committed renewal rate — is above market. Northwest and Bizee include the first year. Filing directly with your Secretary of State costs the state fee and about forty minutes.
The honest summary: these are subscription businesses that file paperwork, not filing businesses that sell subscriptions. Price the second year before you buy the first.