A doola Alternative for Founders Who Want Advice, Not a Checkout

If you are on this page, you have already found doola. You are trying to work out whether a platform is the right tool for your situation.

That is the honest question, so here is the honest answer, including the parts where a platform wins.

What doola is genuinely good at

Volume incorporation, executed competently. If your case is simple (you know which state you want, your residency situation is already settled, your business model is unremarkable and you mainly need the filing done cheaply and fast), a self-serve platform is a reasonable purchase. Pretending otherwise would be marketing rather than advice.

They are also transparent about being a platform. The friction is not deceit; it is the model. A company processing thousands of formations cannot put a senior person on each one at that price, and it does not claim to.

There is a second thing they do well that rarely gets said out loud: they have made US company formation legible to people who would otherwise never have attempted it. Ten years ago a founder in Bogotá or Lisbon had to find a US attorney and hope. That is a real contribution, and the whole category, including us, benefits from it.

What the tiers actually cost

This is where most comparisons get sloppy, so here are the published numbers, with the caveat that they change often.

Checked on doola.com and firstbase.io in August 2026. Read the live pages before deciding; if what you find differs from what follows, trust the live page and tell us so we can correct this one.

doola publishes four plans. The entry plan, Starter, is $297 per year plus state fees and covers formation, EIN, a US business address, registered agent and guidance on opening a bank account. The tier most buyers end up on, Tax and Compliance, is $1,999 per year plus state fees and adds federal and state tax filing plus a consultation with a licensed professional. Above that, Business-in-a-Box is $2,999 per year.

Firstbase is structured differently: $399 one-time for Start, with registered agent sold separately as Agent Autopilot at $299 per year per state, and tax filing at $1,799 per year.

Two observations that matter more than the headline figures.

First, read the billing unit. doola’s entry price is annual; Firstbase’s is one-time with the recurring parts unbundled. A $297/year plan and a $399 one-time plan are not competing numbers, and the cheaper-looking one over three years depends entirely on which add-ons you end up needing.

Second, the tax filing is the real price. Formation is the cheap part everywhere, including here. What a non-resident single-member LLC actually needs every year is a Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120, and on both platforms that sits in a tier costing well over a thousand dollars a year. If you budget for the formation number and not the compliance number, year two is a surprise. That is not a criticism of either company: the work is genuinely worth paying for. It is a criticism of how the category invites you to compare.

Where the model runs out

A checkout cannot ask questions, and a US LLC is a decision with dependencies. Specifically:

Nobody looks at your tax residency before the sale. The entity gets formed regardless of whether it fits your situation. For a founder mid-move between jurisdictions (a large share of the people reading this), that ordering is backwards, and the consequences surface at filing season in a country the platform has never heard of.

The operating agreement is generated, not drafted. It holds until someone competent reads it: an enterprise client’s legal team during vendor due diligence, or a bank’s compliance officer. That is the fragility that costs real money, and it is invisible until the exact moment it matters.

Banking is a referral rather than a protocol. When the application is declined, the platform’s answer is an article. Ours is a review of what triggered it and a second attempt at an institution that fits your profile. We wrote up how that review works in the banking file, and what a rejection usually means in your bank application was rejected.

Support is a queue. At entry-tier pricing that is a rational business decision, not a failing. It is simply not what you want on the day Stripe freezes your settlement and you have payroll on Friday.

Four cases where a platform is the wrong tool

Abstract comparisons are easy to agree with and useless to decide on. These are the four situations where, in my experience, the self-serve route reliably costs more than it saves.

One: you are between tax residencies. You left one country this year, you have not established the next one, and you are about to create a US entity in the middle of that gap. The entity is the easy part. The hard part is which country will consider that income theirs, and whether your old country still thinks you live there. Form the LLC first and you have committed to an answer before you worked out the question. This is the case where we most often say no, or say wait.

Two: your clients run vendor due diligence. If you invoice enterprises, at some point a procurement or legal team will read your operating agreement, ask who the beneficial owners are, and want the entity documents to match what you told them. Template documents usually survive this. Usually is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and you find out which side of it you are on at the worst possible moment.

Three: you have already been declined by a bank. A decline is information. It usually means something in the file (the activity description, the address, the ownership chain, the country of residence) hit a rule. Applying again at the next institution with the same file produces the same result, and each attempt leaves a trace. This is a case for someone who has seen the pattern, not for a help-centre article.

Four: money is already moving. If you have a live Stripe account, recurring clients and a bank account, you are no longer forming a company: you are restructuring one while it runs. The sequencing matters, and getting it wrong freezes settlement. Platforms are built for the first case, not this one.

What we do instead

Three commitments, in order:

One: the assessment happens before the sale. Where you are tax resident now, where you are heading, where your clients sit, how you get paid. If a US LLC does not fit, we say so and there is nothing to pay. A platform structurally cannot do this: the assessment is the part that would stop the checkout.

Two: the documents are drafted for your case. A real operating agreement for your ownership and activity. A banking file built the way a compliance reviewer reads. A compliance calendar with Form 5472 and state renewals already dated, included in the price rather than sold back to you in year two.

Three: you get a person. I have run my own US LLC since 2019 and built more than 120 of these. When you message, I answer. That does not scale to platform volume, which is exactly why platforms do not offer it.

The comparison that matters is not the feature list. It is the table above: what happens on the day something goes wrong.

What the assessment actually asks

People are reasonably suspicious of the word “assessment”, because in this industry it often means a sales call with a diagnostic hat on. So here is the actual content, and you can judge whether it is real.

Where you are tax resident today, and on what evidence. Not where you have an address or a flight booked. Where the tie-breaker rules in the relevant treaty would put you if someone pushed. For a lot of founders this is the first time anyone has asked, and it is the answer everything else depends on.

Where you are going, and when. A structure that is right for a Portuguese resident is often wrong for the same person eighteen months later in Dubai. If a move is coming, the order of operations changes.

Who pays you, and from where. US clients paying a US entity is a different risk profile from EU clients paying a US entity, both for tax and for the bank. This is also where we find out whether you might be engaged in a US trade or business, which is the question that decides whether the LLC owes US tax at all.

How the money needs to arrive. Stripe, wire, marketplace payouts, card processing. This determines which institutions are realistic, and it is the single biggest predictor of whether the banking stage goes smoothly.

What already exists. Old entities, dormant companies, a previous LLC someone formed and forgot. Inherited problems are the most common thing we find, and they are much cheaper to fix before a new structure is stacked on top.

What happens if you do nothing. The honest baseline. Sometimes it is fine, and the right advice is to keep invoicing as you are for another year. We would rather say that than sell you an entity you will resent.

If you would like the short version of this before speaking to anyone, the assessment tool walks the same logic and gives you a written result with no call attached.

The year-two problem

Almost every unhappy founder I meet is unhappy about year two, not year one. Formation goes fine nearly everywhere. What arrives twelve months later is:

Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120. Required for a foreign-owned single-member LLC even with no US tax due and no income. The penalty for missing it starts at $25,000. This is the single most expensive thing people do not know about, and it is why we treat it as part of the product rather than an upsell. The full explanation is in Form 5472.

The state annual report and franchise tax. Different in every state, on different dates, with different consequences for missing them. Wyoming, Delaware and New Mexico each behave differently, which is most of the reason the state choice matters at all.

Registered agent renewal. Cheap and dull, and the most common cause of a company quietly falling out of good standing, because the reminder goes to an inbox nobody reads.

Whatever your own country wants. The LLC is transparent for US purposes and frequently opaque for yours. That mismatch is where the real tax questions live, and no US formation platform is going to raise it with you.

None of this is exotic. It is simply a calendar, and it either exists or it does not.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

Including us. If a provider cannot answer these clearly, that is your answer.

1. Who reviews my tax residency before you form the entity, and what happens if the answer is that I should not form one?
2. Is the price annual or one-time, and what is the total for three years with everything I will actually need?
3. Is Form 5472 included, and at what point does it become an extra charge?
4. Is my operating agreement drafted for my ownership structure, or generated from a template?
5. Who specifically do I contact when a bank declines me, and what do they do next?
6. What is included in the renewal, and what will the renewal cost?
7. Have you ever told a prospective client not to buy? What was the situation?

The last one is the most revealing. Anyone can claim advisory positioning; the tell is whether they can describe a specific case where they walked away from revenue.

Who should not hire us

Genuinely: if your situation is straightforward, you have already resolved your residency question, and what you need is the cheapest competent filing: use a platform. You will get what you paid for and it will be fine. A meaningful share of the people who fill in our assessment get exactly that answer from us.

Come to us when the case is not simple. When you are moving jurisdictions and the order of operations matters. When a client’s due diligence will read your paperwork. When you have been declined by a bank and need someone to work out why. Or when you already have a structure and suspect nobody ever checked it.

If you are also weighing Firstbase, the three-way comparison is in doola vs Firstbase vs Cheq. If you already incorporated and want out, start with switching your LLC.