Inc Authority Prices Year One at Zero and Declines to Price Year Two.

Read this knowing who wrote it. SC Registered Agent.org competes with Inc Authority for the same customers and asks $99 a year for the service in question. What follows is limited to the pricing Inc Authority put on its public website, and to the pricing it left off, as observed during a July 2026 review. Nothing has been invented to fill the gaps.

Free Is Free, and We Are Not Going to Sneer at It

Sign up for formation with Inc Authority and a year of agent service rides along at no charge. The appointment has to be held from the day the company exists, Inc Authority holds it, and no invoice reaches you for twelve months. A founder counting the opening costs of a business is behaving sensibly by taking that offer, and any page that tries to make a free year sound sinister is overplaying its hand.

The problem is not year one. It is that year one is the only year with a number attached.

What the Free Year Is Bundled Against

Worth measuring the transaction the incentive is riding on, because South Carolina keeps it small.

The statute that sets this state's filing fees prices articles of organization for a limited liability company at one hundred ten dollars. That is S.C. Code § 33-44-1204(a)(1), which says it in words rather than digits: one hundred ten dollars. The state's electronic filing system adds its own processing charge at checkout, so an online submission finishes somewhat above the statutory figure, while the downloadable paper route carries the statutory amount by itself.

A hundred and ten dollars, one time, and then South Carolina largely stops asking. There is no annual report for a standard LLC, no yearly Secretary of State fee, nothing recurring at all unless the company elects corporate tax treatment and moves into the Department of Revenue's system. Which means the agent renewal is not one recurring cost among several here. For most South Carolina LLCs it is the recurring cost, and it is the exact figure Inc Authority does not print.

A Test Instead of a Complaint

We did not want to characterize a competitor's marketing, so we applied a test that any reader can run.

Can a South Carolina owner work out the two-year cost of the service before entering payment details? For eight of the nine providers we track in this state, yes: the renewal is on the page, arithmetic is possible, and a decision can be made in daylight. For Inc Authority, no. The public site carries $0 for the included year and no figure of any kind for the year after it. Not a range, not a "from", not a footnote.

We will not guess at the missing number, because a made-up figure would be the very thing this page is complaining about. The most that can be said responsibly is a general observation about the trade: a rate that no website displays is usually first spoken at a checkout screen or by a salesperson. Read that as an industry pattern rather than as anything documented about Inc Authority, and weight it accordingly.

The question a buyer asks	Inc Authority	SC Registered Agent.org
Cost of the first twelve months	$0, bundled with formation	$99
Cost of the thirteenth month onward	Not published	$99
Two-year total, computable in advance	No	$198
Where the renewal figure can be read	Not on the public site	Here, and on the pricing page

Both of Our Numbers, Printed Together

Year one is $99. Year two is $99. So is year nine. Five years comes to $495 and you can check that multiplication yourself, which is why we bothered to write it down.

Included: a South Carolina street address carrying your agent and designated office entries in place of your own, service of process scanned into your portal within the same business day it lands, an alert sent the moment it posts, permanent access to everything we have received on your behalf, and ordinary mail forwarded at a stated $15 an item.

Cheapest is a word we have to decline. BetterLegal's published $90 is smaller than ours. Ninety-nine belongs among the lowest rates published for South Carolina, and it has the added property of being readable in advance for every year you hold the account.

Inc Authority Comes Off the South Carolina Record in One Step

A single notice to the Secretary of State and a ten dollar fee moves the appointment, filed by mail or online; our change of agent page has the form name, the statute, and the order of operations.

Only one point needs stressing here. Line up the incoming agent before you file, never after. South Carolina asks for the position to be continuously occupied, the notice offers no way to leave it blank, and a company that cancels first is uncovered for however long the paperwork takes. Enrol, file, confirm in the state business search, then close the old arrangement.

Do it during the free year if you like. Ten dollars settles the renewal question before anyone has to ask what the renewal is.

Order Here