Start your business
in the United States

No. This is a review step, not a payment. Nothing leaves your card until you enter payment details on the next screen and confirm there. The formation fee is billed once, and any recurring service you selected starts on the cadence shown next to it.

Your Commenda account opens right away. You log in with the email you used at checkout and complete a short company questionnaire covering your directors, owners, share structure, and ID documents. A named point of contact reviews what you submit and confirms the details with you before anything goes to the state. Your formation documents, EIN, and compliance calendar then all live in that one dashboard.

For each director: full name, home address, phone, email, citizenship, and a passport copy. If a company will own the new entity, we also need that company's legal name, address, and a contact for its authorized representative. If no owner has a U.S. Social Security Number, you also sign and date a paper Form SS-4 so we can apply for the EIN. Everything is uploaded in your dashboard.

Registration takes 3 to 5 business days once your details are in. That covers the state filing and your certificate of incorporation. Delaware is the default state because it is what investors expect and its corporate law is the most predictable, and we flag it before you pay if another state fits you better. Your EIN runs on a separate IRS clock, covered below.

Yes. The state filing fees for your formation are inside the advertised price, so there is no government invoice waiting at the end. Recurring state taxes are a different thing. Delaware's annual franchise tax starts at roughly $300 and is paid to the state every year, and our compliance plan prepares and files that return while the tax itself stays the state's charge.

Yes, and it is a separate service rather than part of the formation price. Every U.S. company has to keep a physical street address in its state of formation to receive legal service, and a P.O. box does not qualify. Our registered agent address with virtual mailroom is $250 a year and appears as its own line on your invoice, with mail scanned to your dashboard the same day it arrives. Use your own qualifying address instead if you have one. The U.S. does not require a local director or resident officer either way.

Yes, we guide and coordinate it. A corporate bank account is mandatory, and we introduce you to partners that suit your profile, including Mercury, Brex, and Airwallex. Setup is remote and usually takes a few days, but it can only start once your EIN is issued. The approval decision is the bank's own process, so we walk you through it rather than open the account for you.

Your annual filings, monthly bookkeeping, and sales tax are separate services. They are priced in this flow and only included if you selected them. The registered agent address and virtual mailroom are a separate $250 a year. Payroll is added when you hire, registering to do business in a second state is quoted separately, and transfer pricing work for payments between your U.S. company and a parent abroad is its own service.

U.S. obligations attach to the company's existence, not its revenue. A dormant Delaware company still owes a federal return, franchise tax and an annual report by March 1, and current beneficial ownership information. The penalties ignore your revenue: a late or incomplete Form 5472, which every foreign-owned U.S. company files, carries a $25,000 IRS penalty per form per year. Late franchise tax adds penalties and interest, and Delaware can mark the entity inactive.

Yes. Every service here can be added or dropped from your dashboard, so you are not locked into today's selection. Two of them cost you something if you wait. Sales tax liability starts the day you cross a state's threshold rather than the day you sign up, and catch-up bookkeeping is priced by the months of backlog.

Your entity gets its own compliance calendar, built from its state, entity type, and fiscal year end, so it lists the obligations that actually apply to you. Reminders go out by email ahead of every due date, and each item carries a status you can check: upcoming, in progress, or filed. We file what your plan covers and the confirmation lands in your dashboard. You also get a named point of contact instead of a ticket queue.

There is no residency or visa requirement to own a U.S. company, but the EIN runs on the IRS clock and the route depends on you. With a U.S. Social Security Number on the application, the EIN comes through in about 1 to 3 days. Without one, the IRS processes a manually signed Form SS-4, which has been taking 6 to 7 weeks. If no owner has an SSN, we can act as responsible party to clear that step with indemnification paperwork in place and then transfer the role back to you, and you should avoid putting an investor's or a friend's SSN on the form because removing them later is painful.