Washington Publishes Its Zero. Inc Authority Publishes No Year Two.

WA Registered Agent.org owns this page and charges $99 a year to do the job Inc Authority also does, which is the sort of thing a reader deserves in the first paragraph rather than the last. Treat what follows as a competitor's account. The prices attributed to Inc Authority are the company's own, taken from a July 2026 read of its public site, and one of them turned out not to exist.

The Free Year Is Free, and We Will Not Undercut That

Order formation through Inc Authority and twelve months of registered agent coverage arrive at no charge. That is a real offer arriving at the exact moment a new business has already committed every dollar it has. Anyone insisting a genuinely free inclusion is secretly a trap is doing sales, not analysis. Take the year.

The Number That Was Not There

What happens in month thirteen is the part we could not report to you, so here is exactly what we did instead of guessing.

We opened the front page and read the pricing presented there. We opened the premium package listings and read what each tier includes and what each tier costs. We opened the questions page and searched it for anything resembling a recurring agent charge. Across all three, the first-year zero appears repeatedly and clearly. A renewal amount appears nowhere.

That is the whole finding. We will not characterize a figure we have never seen, or imply the silence hides something terrible. It might be an entirely reasonable price. What we can say is that seeing it before you are asked to pay it will require asking, because the ordinary places for the answer to sit were empty when we looked.

Why it matters in this state in particular: Washington wants an agent named on the record for every year your entity stays registered here, the fortieth as much as the first. Which makes a free year the opening leg of a recurring purchase whose recurring price is the one nobody can see.

Washington's Habit of Printing Everything

Set that beside how the state behaves with its own charges, because the contrast is unusually sharp here.

Washington's for-profit annual report costs $70 a year. Miss the last day of your anniversary month and the delinquency fee is $25, with no grace period at all before it attaches, and continued failure ends in administrative dissolution under RCW 23.95.610. A Certificate of Formation is $180 in statute. Expedited handling is $100. And moving your registered agent from one holder to another costs nothing, which the state manages to publish three separate times: in the rule setting its fee schedule, on the fee schedule itself, and as a box on the change form reading "No Filing Fee."

A government agency printed a zero three times. It gained nothing by doing so and it did so anyway.

The Option You Can Price Yourself Exactly

There is one more Washington price you can know in advance, and it is on the same form.

The state lays out the ways to fill the agent seat as numbered types, and the third of them permits an office or position within the business to hold the appointment. The form gives examples: President, Member. The entity itself never appears on the agent line, but a titled seat inside it can, and whoever occupies that title receives what is served.

Cost, exactly and knowably: nothing. Requirements, also exactly and knowably: a physical Washington street address, with the form refusing both PO boxes and PMBs by name; a person genuinely at that address through business hours; and the title plus address entered into a public record any person can search. A company with a staffed location and no privacy concern has a complete, free answer sitting right there, its full price knowable before committing. Which is the entire point of raising it here.

Our Two Numbers, Both in Advance

First year, $99. Every year after, $99. That is the complete pricing disclosure and it has now ended.

Underneath it:

• A Washington street address of ours going onto the public filings so that yours does not
• Court papers turned into a scan in your account before the day they arrived is finished, an email alert attached
• Advance warning before your anniversary month shuts, because Washington leaves no grace period once it has
• Every document we have received for you, held in the portal and reachable at any hour
• Non-legal mail imaged at $15 an item, written down here before you buy rather than after
• One product on the order page, with nothing stacked behind it

And a number that cuts against us, printed for the same reason all the others are. BetterLegal charges $90 annually. Our $99 belongs to the cheap end of the published field, a notch above its actual floor.

Washington's Exit From Inc Authority Is a Free One-Page Filing

Compressed, because the state made it compressible: the Statement of Change/Designation of Registered Agent carries no number, costs $0, and goes to the Corporations & Charities Division on paper or through the state's business filing portal. Our Washington change of agent page covers the fields.

The order to do it in: appoint first, cancel never. Washington requires the incoming agent's consent in a record before it will record the designation, we provide that at signup, and the filing swaps the names in one motion with no way to leave the seat empty. Your free year can then finish on its own schedule with our name already on the record, which costs you nothing and removes any deadline pressure from the decision.

One Email Worth Sending

If your free twelve months are running out, write and ask what the next twelve cost, in text where you can reread it. Whatever comes back will land next to a figure printed further up this page before you ever sent the message, in a state that charges nothing to act on the difference.

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