You are comparing two platforms. It is worth knowing that they are not competing for the same founder.
doola sells volume incorporation. Firstbase sells a startup toolkit. Both are competent at what they are actually for. The mistake is assuming the choice is between them, when for a good number of international founders the real question is whether a self-serve platform fits the case at all.
The short version
Pick doola if your situation is simple, already settled, and price is the deciding factor. It is fast, cheap, and does what it says.
Pick Firstbase if you are on a US funding path and need Delaware plus the surrounding apparatus because investors expect it.
Pick neither if your tax residency question is still open, if banking is going to be the hard part, or if your documents will be read by an enterprise client’s legal team. That is the case we exist for, and the table above is the comparison that matters.
What each one costs
Prices move, so treat this as a snapshot with a date on it: checked on doola.com and firstbase.io in August 2026. Verify on the live pages before you decide.
doola publishes four annual plans. Starter is $297 per year plus state fees, covering formation, EIN, business address and registered agent. Tax and Compliance is $1,999 per year plus state fees and adds federal and state tax filing with a licensed professional. Business-in-a-Box is $2,999 per year and adds a dedicated bookkeeper. A separate bookkeeping product, Pulse, is $300 per year.
Firstbase unbundles instead. Start is $399 one-time for formation and EIN. Registered agent is $299 per year per state. Tax filing is $1,799 per year. A combined subscription, Firstbase One, bundles those at $199 per month.
Three things to take from this rather than the raw numbers:
The billing units differ. One is annual from the first day, the other is one-time with recurring parts sold alongside. Comparing $297 against $399 tells you nothing until you decide which recurring pieces you need.
Formation is the cheap part everywhere. On both platforms, and here. The money is in the annual filing, and both put that in a tier above a thousand dollars a year. That is not a markup: a Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120 prepared properly is genuinely that kind of work.
Nobody’s entry tier includes the annual US filing. If you budget for the formation figure and stop there, you have budgeted for roughly the first three months of a multi-year commitment.
doola: volume incorporation
Strong at speed and price. Their marketing is aimed squarely at “get your LLC today”, and they deliver that. They also run comparison pages against LegalZoom and ZenBusiness, which tells you who they consider the competition: other filing services.
The limit is structural rather than a flaw. A checkout cannot ask where you are tax resident, cannot notice that you are mid-move between jurisdictions, and cannot decide that you should not buy. When your case is simple, none of that matters. When it is not, all of it does.
Worth adding in their favour: the higher tiers do include real tax work with a licensed professional. If you go that route, you are not buying a filing robot. You are buying a competent service at a fair price with a queue instead of a named person, which for many founders is a perfectly rational trade.
Firstbase: the startup toolkit
Better product experience, clearly aimed at founders heading toward institutional capital. Delaware, cap table tooling, an ecosystem of partner services.
The mismatch appears when you are not raising. Delaware without investors means a flat annual tax, more paperwork than Wyoming and weaker privacy: a cost with no return. Their country-specific pages acknowledge international founders exist, but a page about your nationality is not an analysis of your residency.
Their unbundled pricing is also a genuine virtue that gets read as a drawback. Nothing is hidden inside a package you did not choose. The catch is that it moves the arithmetic onto you, and most people do the arithmetic after buying rather than before.
What both share
Three things, and they are the three that hurt:
The assessment does not happen. Both models start at the purchase. Nobody establishes whether the structure fits before it is filed, which for a founder between jurisdictions is exactly the wrong order.
The paperwork is generated. The operating agreement holds right up until someone competent reads it: a bank’s compliance officer, or a client’s legal team during vendor due diligence. That fragility is invisible until the moment it is expensive.
Banking is a referral. Both hand you a marketplace link. Neither builds the file, picks the institution that fits your profile, or does anything useful on the day you are declined, which happens to perfectly good applications. What that day actually looks like is in your bank application was rejected.
How to decide in five minutes
Four questions. Answer them honestly and the choice usually makes itself.
1. Is your tax residency settled, and can you name the country? If you hesitated, stop here. No platform will resolve this and forming an entity first makes it harder, not easier. Start with tax residency or run the assessment.
2. Is anyone going to invest in this company in the next two years? If yes, Delaware and Firstbase’s world is probably where you belong, and you should be talking to US startup counsel as well. If no, Delaware is a cost you are paying for a signal nobody is reading.
3. How hard will your banking be? Rough proxy: if you are a solo consultant with EU clients and a clean profile, moderately easy. If you are in e-commerce, crypto-adjacent, high-risk processing, or resident somewhere banks treat as elevated risk, it is the hardest part of the whole project and it is where the money should go.
4. Will anyone competent read your documents? Enterprise clients, procurement teams, a bank’s compliance officer, a future acquirer. If the answer is yes, template paperwork is a liability with a delay fuse on it.
Two or more answers pointing at difficulty means a self-serve platform is the wrong tool, whichever one you pick.
Three founders, three different answers
Composite cases, built from the kind of situation that actually walks in. Names and details changed, and none of them is a testimonial: they are here because the reasoning transfers.
The consultant who already knows what she wants. Portuguese resident, settled there for years, invoices four US clients on retainer, no employees, no plans to raise anything. She has read enough to know she wants a Wyoming single-member LLC and she is not confused about her residency. A platform is the right purchase. She needs a filing and an EIN, she will use a fintech account, and paying advisory rates for a decision she has already made correctly is money wasted. The only thing worth pushing her on is budgeting for the annual 5472 rather than discovering it next spring.
The founder mid-move. Left Spain in March, spending the year between three countries, has not established residency anywhere new, and is about to sign a large contract with a US client who wants to pay a US entity. This is the case where a platform actively hurts. Not because the filing would be wrong, but because forming the entity commits him to an answer on a question he has not resolved: Spain may well still consider him resident for this tax year, and that determines whether the LLC solves his problem or creates a second one. The right first step is not incorporation, it is establishing where he actually stands. Sometimes the answer is to wait six months, and that is advice no checkout can give.
The e-commerce seller with a rejection. Two Amazon storefronts, real revenue, a US LLC formed eighteen months ago through a platform, and three declined bank applications with no explanation. This is not a formation problem at all. The entity is fine. The file is the problem: a vague activity description, an address that reads as a mail forwarder, and an operating agreement that does not match what the business does. Nobody at a platform is going to read those three documents together and spot it, because reading them together is the entire job. This is the case we most often fix, and it is worth noting it started with a purchase that was cheap and looked successful for a year.
The pattern across all three: the platforms are excellent at the first case, neutral in the second, and structurally unable to help in the third.
The EIN, where both of them will disappoint you equally
Worth its own note because it is the most common source of frustration and it is nobody’s fault.
The EIN is issued by the IRS, not by your provider. If you have no SSN or ITIN, the application cannot be filed online and goes through a slower channel. Timelines vary with IRS workload and are outside anyone’s control, which is why “expedited EIN” as a paid feature means expedited handling of your paperwork, not a faster IRS.
What actually causes most delays is avoidable and has nothing to do with which provider you chose: a responsible party field filled in wrongly, a name that does not exactly match the state filing, an address the IRS cannot process, or a resubmission that lands behind the original in the queue. We wrote the specifics up in getting an EIN without an SSN.
Treat any promise of a guaranteed EIN date the same way you should treat a guaranteed bank account: as information about the seller rather than about the process.
The third option
Not a platform: an advisor who forms the structure. The assessment comes first and can end in “do not do this”. The documents are drafted for your case. The banking file is built before you apply, for both fintech and traditional tiers. Year-one compliance is included and dated. And the person who answers your message is the one who designed the thing.
That does not scale to platform volume and it does not compete on price, which is the honest reason platforms do not offer it and the honest reason we cost more.
It also is not always the right answer. If your case is simple, buy the cheap thing and spend the difference on your actual business. We tell people that on calls and it costs us revenue, which is roughly the point.
If you have already incorporated with either of them and want a second opinion on what you actually have, switching your LLC starts with that audit. If you are still deciding, the assessment is the cheapest way to find out which of the three answers is yours.
Also weighing Stripe Atlas? The four-way comparison puts all three platforms next to Cheq Capital, side by side.
Frequently asked questions
So which one should I pick?
If your case is simple and price is the deciding factor, doola. If you are raising from US investors and need a Delaware C-Corp with the surrounding tooling, Firstbase. If your residency question is unresolved, your banking is going to be hard, or your paperwork will be read by someone with an interest in finding holes, a platform is the wrong tool regardless of which one.
Are you just using this page to sell against them?
Partly, obviously: you found it because you were comparing. But the recommendations above are the ones we give on calls, including the ones that send people to a platform. A comparison that never concludes "use the other option" is an advert, and you would spot it.
Is Delaware better than Wyoming?
Only with investors. Delaware's corporate law and courts are what institutional money expects: that is its real value, not tax. For a non-resident single-member LLC with no funding round, Delaware means a flat annual tax, more paperwork and weaker privacy, in exchange for nothing. Wyoming or New Mexico is usually the correct answer.
Do any of you guarantee a bank account?
Nobody can, and you should treat the promise as a disqualifier wherever you see it: the decision belongs to the bank. The honest differentiator is what happens around that decision: whether someone builds the file properly, picks the right institution, and regroups when the answer is no.
Which one is cheapest over three years?
It depends entirely on which add-ons you end up needing, which is why the headline prices mislead. As published in August 2026, doola's entry plan is billed annually and its tax-filing tier is a different price band; Firstbase's formation fee is one-time but registered agent and tax filing are separate annual line items. Build the three-year total for your own case with the pieces you will actually use, and compare that. Nobody's marketing page will do it for you.
Can I start on a platform and move to an advisor later?
Yes, and a lot of people do: it is where a meaningful share of our clients come from. The transferable parts are the entity itself and the EIN, which stay yours. What usually gets redone is the operating agreement, the registered agent and the compliance calendar. Starting cheap is not a mistake you have to live with.
Does either of them handle my taxes at home?
No, and neither do we beyond Spain and Latin America, where our own depth is real. Both platforms sell US federal and state filing. What happens in the country where you actually live is a separate question with a separate professional attached, and it is usually the more consequential of the two. Anyone implying that a US filing package settles your position at home is selling something.