How we rank things
We review business services the same way we review an MOS: what does it actually cost, what happens after the pitch, and what does it look like eighteen months in when nobody is selling you anything. Below is every input we use, in the order it matters — and the things that will get a company thrown off a page no matter what it pays.
The ranking inputs
- 1. Total real cost, year one and year two. Not the headline price. The renewal, the registered agent fee, the compliance upsell, and the thing that was "free" until month thirteen. Year two is where formation services do their damage, so year two carries equal weight.
- 2. Whether you're being sold something you can get free. An EIN is free from the IRS. SAM.gov registration is free. Filing your own LLC is a form and a fee. Any vendor whose business model depends on you not knowing that gets marked down hard, and we say which parts you should just do yourself.
- 3. Fit for a veteran-owned business specifically. Does it handle the paperwork trail an SDVOSB certification actually requires? Does it survive a federal contract audit? A great generic tool that falls apart the moment you need documented ownership and control is not a great tool for this audience.
- 4. Exit cost. How hard is it to leave. Data export, cancellation path, whether they hold your registered agent address hostage. Anything that's easy to enter and hard to exit gets said out loud.
- 5. Track record with small accounts. Documented pattern of account freezes, support that vanishes below a revenue threshold, or terms that quietly exclude the businesses most veterans actually start.
What is not an input
Commission. What a vendor pays us has no weight in the list above, and there is no tiebreaker where it returns. If two services genuinely tie, we say they tie and tell you which to pick based on your situation, not ours. Our advertising and affiliate disclosure spells out every way this site earns, precisely so you can audit that claim against the rankings yourself.
Automatic disqualifiers
Any one of these and a vendor is off the page, regardless of price, features, or payout:
- — Charging for something a federal or state agency provides free, without saying so.
- — Recurring charges that aren't disclosed at the point of signup.
- — Cancellation that is materially harder than signup.
- — Misrepresenting veteran eligibility rules or what a certification gets you.
- — Marketing that implies a government affiliation the company does not have.
What we tested and what we didn't
Where a verdict comes from hands-on use, the page says so. Where it comes from published pricing, terms of service, and regulatory filings, the page says that instead. We will not imply we ran payroll through six platforms when we read six pricing pages. Sourcing for every factual claim about a statute, a fee, or a program is linked inline, and the date we last checked it sits on the page — not in a changelog nobody opens.
One vendor claims a right to approve what we write. We don't give it to them.
Some affiliate programs attach conditions to the money that have nothing to do with disclosure and everything to do with control. The clearest example in this section: Bizee's affiliate terms prohibit trademark modifications including the word “review”, and assert a right to pre-approve marketing materials that reference Bizee. We earn commission from Bizee, and Bizee appears in our LLC service comparison.
We have never submitted a word of this section to them, and we will not. A vendor holding approval rights over a comparison that includes itself is precisely the thing this section exists to warn people about, and honouring that clause would make the promise at the top of this page false. So the clause sits there unexercised, and you get told it exists.
The consequence, stated plainly so there is no surprise later: if any vendor ever challenges honest guidance or reverses commissions over something we published, we drop the program and keep the coverage unpaid. What you read does not change either way — only whether we get paid for it. That is the whole point of putting the money on a separate page from the verdict.
Corrections
Fees change, programs get repealed, and a company that was fine last year starts doing something ugly this year. If you find something wrong on one of these pages — especially if you found it the expensive way — send it to us. We fix it and stamp the page with the new verification date.
Questions people actually ask
Have you personally used every service you review?
No, and we label which ones we have not. Where a verdict rests on published pricing and terms rather than hands-on use, the page says so directly. We would rather be plainly limited than quietly imply testing we did not do.
What disqualifies a company from being recommended?
Automatic disqualifiers are: charging for something the government provides free, undisclosed recurring charges, making cancellation materially harder than signup, and misrepresenting veteran status requirements or benefits. Any one of these removes a vendor from contention regardless of what it pays us.
How often are these pages updated?
Pricing and program terms are re-verified on a quarterly cycle, and every page displays the date its facts were last checked. Anything past 180 days without verification is flagged for review automatically rather than left to look current.