LLC Registered Agent, Part 4

We recently received an invoice from InCorp Services to renew them as the registered agent for our LLC, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had already applied the same price-guarantee discount we received last year to this year's price—without us having to reapply. InCorp's normal annual fee is $99, which is cheap compared to LegalZoom* at $159 per year, but we had to pay only $49. InCorp FTW!

For further information on registered agents, including whether your LLC needs one, and how to get the first year of InCorp's service absolutely free, review the first installment of this series. If you read carefully, you can also find the company that we cited to qualify for that huge price-guarantee discount; this company, unfortunately, only serves California, so if your LLC operates in another state, you'll have to do your own research.

If you decide to use InCorp Services after reading this blog post, please consider using our referral code.

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*We highly recommend LegalZoom for their LLC-formation service, which is of the highest quality; however, the price of their registered-agent service can easily be beat—in our case, by 69%.

Disclaimer Game, Part 2

As mentioned in part one, our website needs to have a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service before we open it to the public. Like most bootstrapped startups, however, we never seriously considered hiring an attorney to draft these legal disclaimers for us. Fortunately, the Web is chock full of examples, templates, and even generators that will come to your rescue.

After Mike and I did our research, we decided to use Automattic's privacy policy and terms of service, which are each available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. In short, this means we are free to adapt the documents to our specific needs and to make commercial use of them. Automattic doesn't even require an attribution, though we are more than happy to oblige.

Unlike most of the other examples and templates available on the Web, these particular documents are being actively used, which adds a level of assurance that they will hold legal muster; in fact, Automattic uses them for widely visited websites, such as Wordpress.com. As they write:

"We spent a lot of money and time on [these documents], and other people shouldn’t need to do the same."

Another nice feature is the change log, which allows us to keep our privacy policy and terms of service in sync with theirs as they evolve over time. As Mike can attest, editing these documents will require some research as to which sections are actually applicable to your business, as well as which additions you will be required to make by third parties, such as any companies that run ads on your website.

Status Update

In July, we completed work on our last custom Drupal module, and began testing our fourth alpha release. We expect to have our final alpha release in August, followed by the launch of our first beta release in late summer. If you are interested in being a beta tester, please sign up here to claim one of the remaining spots.

Status Update

This past month, we made a number of improvements with respect to the presentation of user data. We also continued development of the final custom module—the major milestone for the fourth alpha release, which should go into its testing phase next week. If you are interested in testing our first beta release this summer, please sign up here to claim one of the remaining spots. For those who have already signed up to be a beta tester, we appreciate your continued patience.

Status Update

This month, we simplified the public site by moving the sign-up form to the front page, eliminating the promotion feature, and removing the test ads. Also, we began development of the fourth alpha release, which should be completed in June. If you are interested in testing our first beta release this summer, please sign up here to claim one of the remaining spots. For those who have already signed up to be a beta tester, we appreciate your continued patience.