After Bizee's Free Months, What Does the Seat Cost?

The usual caveat, stated plainly: Illinois Registered Agent.co is in this business too, at $99 annually, and we wrote this page hoping to win your order. Bizee's numbers are Bizee's, pulled from their published pricing during a July 2026 check, and you can verify them in a minute.

A Real Discount, at the Right Moment

Bizee, which spent years trading as Incfile, folds the agent role into its formation packages free of charge for three to twelve months, the length depending on which tier you pick. That is worth having. Organizing an Illinois LLC already means writing the state a check, $150 on Form LLC-5.5 for a standard company or $400 for a series LLC, so anything that removes a line from the same order is money you keep. We would take the bundle too.

The Handover to $149

The offer has a second half. When the free stretch runs out, standalone agent service bills $149 a year, automatically and without ceremony. That is the number your Illinois LLC lives with for as long as it exists, because the bundle was a promotion and $149 is the price.

Notice the shape of the risk. It is not that $149 is outrageous, because it is not. It is that the day the meter starts is a day only one party has any reason to remember, and it is not the party paying. A three-month bundle runs out inside a quarter. A twelve-month bundle runs out on an anniversary you will be busy for. Put it on your own calendar the day you buy, so the expiry becomes a decision rather than a charge you spot afterward.

Whoever Holds the Seat Clears the Same Bar

Here the comparison gets simple, because Illinois will not let either of us be more qualified than the other. Under 805 ILCS 180/1-35 your agent has to be a person who lives in Illinois, or a company holding its own registration with the state and cleared to operate here. The registered office must be kept up continuously inside Illinois, and it must match the address the agent uses for its own business, which is why a post office box on its own does not satisfy the state.

There is one more line in that statute people find surprising: your LLC may not act as its own registered agent. Illinois does not offer the do-it-yourself route that some states allow, so hiring an outside agent is not an optimization here. It is the only structure available to you.

Both companies clear the bar. Neither of us earns extra credit for it. What is left is what the appointment costs, how quickly a summons reaches you, and whether anyone is watching your deadlines.

Our Side of It

$99 a year, then $99 again every year, with one item at checkout and nothing to upgrade into. A process server who visits our Illinois office hands papers to a person, and the scan reaches you before that business day is out. The address on your state record is ours. Your annual report window gets a heads-up before it opens rather than after it closes.

The claim we are not making is cheapest. BetterLegal publishes $90 a year and we know it. Ours belongs to the lowest band of Illinois pricing while including same-day scanning, at a rate that never revises itself upward.

Changing From Bizee to an Illinois Agent That Bills Once

The instrument is Form LLC-1.36/1.37, the state's short change of agent statement, priced at $25. It goes to the Limited Liability Division of the Illinois Secretary of State's Department of Business Services. The title carries two numbers because the form does two jobs: 1-36 covers your company installing a different agent, while 1-37 covers an agent revising its own address on file. You want the first.

Filling it in takes a few minutes. Company name and file number, the outgoing agent with its registered office, then the incoming agent with its Illinois registered office. Sign it, send the $25, and check your entity record a few business days later to confirm the change landed. Only after that do you cancel with Bizee.

That order is not fussiness. The form offers no blank-seat option, so the replacement has to be hired before you can honestly complete it, and Illinois backs the rule up with a $100 penalty against any LLC that goes two months without appointing a successor once the old agent has given notice. Filed the normal way, with the incoming name already on the page, your record is never without an agent for a single day and the penalty is irrelevant to you. Full detail lives on our change of agent page.

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