Firstbase is built for one kind of founder. The question is whether it is your kind.
Their product is aimed at startups on a US funding path: Delaware, a cap table, investors who expect a familiar shape. It is a coherent product for that audience.
If you are an international founder who is not raising capital (an e-commerce seller in Australia, an agency owner in the Netherlands, a consultant who just moved to Dubai), you are buying a startup toolkit to solve a very different problem.
What Firstbase is built for
Credit where it is due: clean execution, a good product experience, and an ecosystem that genuinely helps if you are heading toward institutional funding. Delaware makes sense when investors’ lawyers expect Delaware. The cap table tooling matters when there is a cap table.
They also run a large set of country-specific pages, which tells you they know the international founder exists. That is a marketing surface, though, and not the same as someone examining your tax residency before you file.
Their pricing is also unbundled in a way I respect. Checked on firstbase.io in August 2026: Start is $399 one-time, registered agent is $299 per year per state under Agent Autopilot, and tax filing is $1,799 per year. Nothing is hidden. You simply have to add it up yourself, and most people compare the $399 against someone else’s all-in number without noticing they are comparing different things.
The mismatch for founders abroad
Delaware without investors is a recurring cost with no return. More paperwork than Wyoming, weaker privacy, and no tax advantage whatsoever for a non-resident single-member LLC. If nobody is investing, you are paying for a signal nobody is reading.
A page about your nationality is not an analysis of your residency. What determines your position is where you are genuinely tax resident this year and how that jurisdiction treats a US pass-through. Nobody can answer that from a template, and we would rather be honest that our own depth runs to Spain and Latin America, with local partners beyond it, than pretend a landing page covers Dutch or Australian tax law.
Banking is the step where the model shows its limits. Getting an account for a non-resident LLC is a documentation exercise: what each institution reviews, how the business story reads, which bank fits your profile. That is work someone has to do, and it is not a link.
Compliance arrives as an upsell. Form 5472 with its $25,000 penalty is what keeps the structure legal. We include year one because a structure without it is not finished.
Delaware is the expensive part of the mismatch
This deserves its own section, because it is the most common thing I end up unwinding.
Delaware’s reputation is real and it is also specific. It exists because of the Court of Chancery, a century of settled corporate case law, and the fact that venture investors and their counsel have standardised on it. Every one of those advantages is about disputes between shareholders. If you are the only member of your LLC, there are no shareholders to have a dispute with.
What you get instead is the cost side of that reputation. A flat annual tax that a Delaware LLC owes every year regardless of revenue, on top of the registered agent, and due on a date most people learn about the year they miss it. Filings that are less private than Wyoming or New Mexico. And a state whose reputation attracts extra scrutiny from some banks and payment processors precisely because it is where a lot of shell companies live.
None of that makes Delaware wrong. It makes Delaware a purchase that should have a reason. The reason “it is what serious companies use” is a reason to ask who told you that and what they were selling. We wrote the full state-by-state version in Wyoming vs Delaware vs New Mexico.
The practical test: if you cannot name a specific person who will ask you why you are not in Delaware, you probably do not need to be in Delaware.
Not sure how this applies to your case?
Eleven questions and we tell you whether the LLC fits, and if it does not, that too.
What Firstbase actually costs
Checked on firstbase.io on 14 September 2026. Read the live pricing page before deciding, because these figures move and there is usually a promotion running on the entry product.
Firstbase Start lists at $399 one-time for a Delaware or Wyoming formation with the state fee, an expedited EIN and the core documents included; at the time of checking it was on offer at $99 plus the state fee. The recurring pieces are where the real bill sits. Registered agent renews at $299 per year per state after the first year. Tax filing for a single-member LLC owned by a non-US person is $899 per year, which is the tier that matches most readers of this page; the $1,799 tier is the C-corp and multi-member package, so check you are being quoted the right one. Firstbase One bundles mailroom, registered agent, accounting and tax filing into $199 per month billed yearly, about $2,388 a year.
The formation number is the cheap part everywhere, including here. Before comparing $399 against anyone else’s all-in price, add up what you will actually use over three years: registered agent, the annual filing a foreign-owned single-member LLC cannot skip (Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120, even at zero activity), and any add-ons. That three-year figure is the one to compare.
If your bank account gets rejected
Firstbase is upfront that banking is not the core of the product; formation and the perks marketplace are the pitch. Once the LLC is filed, opening a US account as a non-resident is left to you and a partner link.
US banking partners for LLCs decline applications for identifiable, predictable reasons: a country of residence on a restricted list, an incomplete beneficial-ownership disclosure, a business address that reads as an empty shell, or a business model the bank will not underwrite. None of that means the LLC is broken. It means one specific trigger tripped, and triggers are fixable once you know which one it was. Some fintechs also record a decline against the LLC’s EIN, so reapplying to the same bank with the same details can be auto-rejected without a fresh human review.
The gap is what happens next. Firstbase does not own the banking relationship, so there is nobody to review the rejection reason with you. You are left researching alternative providers and resubmitting documentation you already prepared once, often while a client payment is stuck with nowhere to land. The seven reasons banks decline non-resident LLCs, and what to do about each, are in your bank application was rejected. Which provider even admits your country is in the acceptance table.
What changes with an advisor
The sequence inverts. Instead of pick a package → file → work out the rest, it runs: assess the fit → design the structure → build the file → maintain it.
In practice that means the state gets chosen for your actual case, the operating agreement describes the company you actually run, the banking file exists before you apply, and the compliance calendar is dated before you need it. And when a bank declines, which happens to good applications, there is someone to work out why and go again.
I have run my own US LLC since 2019 and built and maintained more than 120 for founders outside the US. That is the entire product: judgement applied to your case, and a named person for the year.
What the first ninety days look like
Concretely, so you can compare like for like against a platform’s onboarding flow.
Week one: the assessment and the decision. Residency, destination, client base, payment rails, what already exists. This ends either with a recommended structure and a state, or with a recommendation not to form anything yet. Both are real outcomes. If it is the second one, you have paid nothing.
Week one to three: formation and EIN. The filing itself is the fast part. The EIN is the part with unpredictable timing, because it depends on the IRS and on whether you have an SSN or ITIN. We cover what actually causes the delays in getting an EIN without an SSN; most of them are self-inflicted and avoidable.
Week three to six: the banking file. The operating agreement, the activity description, the ownership chain, the address, proof of the business that already exists. This is assembled before anything is submitted, because the application is a document review and the review only happens once per institution.
Week four to eight: the application, and the second attempt if needed. Fintech, traditional, or both depending on how you get paid. A decline at this stage is not a failure, it is information, and the reason we prepare the file first is so that the information is useful rather than random. What a rejection usually means has the detail.
Week eight onward: the calendar. Form 5472 dated, state annual report dated, registered agent renewal dated, and whatever your own country requires noted alongside. This is the part that is worth more in year three than it looks in month two.
The honest caveat: those ranges are typical, not promised. The IRS sets the EIN timeline and banks set their own, and anyone who guarantees you a date on either is guessing.
If you already have a Delaware LLC and want out
This comes up often enough to deserve the mechanics rather than a shrug.
There are three routes, and they are not equally good.
Route one: leave it where it is. Genuinely the right answer more often than people expect. If the entity is banking fine, filing on time and nothing is broken, the annual Delaware tax is a small price against the disruption of moving. Changing state means a new EIN in some scenarios, a new bank application in most, and a fresh round of updating every client, processor and platform you are connected to. That is weeks of your attention to save a few hundred dollars a year.
Route two: domestication, where the target state allows it. Some states let you convert an existing LLC into one of theirs while keeping the entity’s identity and, usually, its EIN. This is the clean route when it is available, because the company continues rather than restarts. It has to be checked state by state and it is not free.
Route three: form new, wind down old. Sometimes the only option, and sometimes the better one if the original entity has problems worth leaving behind. The cost is that you are starting the banking relationship from zero and you have two sets of filings in the transition year, including a final return for the old entity. Dissolving cleanly matters here: an LLC that is simply abandoned keeps accruing obligations and can leave you personally exposed on filings you never made.
Whichever route, the sequencing rule is the same one that governs everything else on this page: do not close anything until the replacement is working. People dissolve the old entity, then discover the new bank application takes six weeks, and spend a month unable to invoice. The overlap costs a little money and prevents a lot of damage.
What we do in practice is audit first and recommend one of the three, and route one is a real recommendation that we make regularly. The full process is in switching your LLC.
What we are not good at
Symmetry matters in a page like this, so here are our own limits, stated plainly.
We are not the right call for C-Corps and funding rounds. If institutional money is coming, you need US startup counsel and probably Delaware, and Firstbase’s world is built for exactly that. We would point you there.
Our tax depth is Spain and Latin America. That is where we can speak to the local treatment of a US pass-through with confidence. For Dutch, Australian, German or Nordic specifics we bring in a local partner rather than pretend, and you should be suspicious of anyone in this category who claims uniform depth across forty countries.
We are slower than a platform on pure formation. The assessment adds time before anything is filed. If you have already done the thinking and just need the filing executed this week, that time is a cost with no benefit to you.
We are more expensive, and we do not discount. If price is the deciding factor, that is a legitimate way to decide, and the answer it produces is not us.
When Firstbase is the right answer
If you are raising a round from US investors, need a Delaware C-Corp because their lawyers require it, and want tooling built for that path: use them. We would tell you the same on a call, and we have.
Choose an advisor instead when you are not raising, when the residency question is live, when banking is the hard part, or when the structure will be read by someone with an interest in finding holes.
Comparing all three? The three-way view is in doola vs Firstbase vs Cheq. Already incorporated and unsure what you have? Start with switching your LLC.
Frequently asked questions
What does Firstbase do well?
Incorporation at scale, a clean product experience, and a genuinely useful ecosystem if you are a startup on a US-style funding path: Delaware C-Corp, cap table, investors who expect that shape. If that describes you, they are a sensible choice and we would say so.
Why does a country-specific page not make you the same thing?
Because a page per nationality is a marketing surface, not a tax opinion. What actually determines your position is where you are tax resident this year and what your local rules do with a US pass-through, which is a conversation, not a landing page. We would rather have the conversation and, where our own depth ends, bring in a local partner.
I am not raising capital. Does that change the recommendation?
Substantially. Most of the Delaware-and-cap-table apparatus exists for founders who will take institutional money. If you are an e-commerce seller, an agency owner or a consultant billing international clients, you are usually better served by a simpler entity in a cheaper state, with the effort spent on banking and compliance instead.
Can you take over a structure Firstbase already formed?
Yes: registered agent change, audit of what was and was not filed, a proper operating agreement, and a rebuilt compliance calendar. See switch your LLC. If the entity is in the wrong state for your actual situation we will tell you that too, along with what fixing it would involve.
Is Firstbase's $399 the whole cost?
No, and they do not claim it is. As published on firstbase.io in August 2026, Start is $399 one-time, with registered agent sold separately at $299 per year per state and tax filing at $1,799 per year. That unbundling is honest, but it means the formation price and the running price are different conversations. Add up three years of what you will actually use before comparing it against anything.
I already have a Delaware LLC and I am not raising. Should I move it?
Not automatically. Moving a state costs money and effort, and if the entity is banking fine and filing on time, the annual Delaware franchise tax may be cheaper than the disruption. The calculation changes if you are also about to redo banking or if the entity has compliance gaps anyway: then you are opening the patient regardless and the state question is worth reopening at the same time.
Do you work with C-Corps?
Rarely, and we will say so early. A C-Corp is the right vehicle when institutional investment is coming, and that path needs US startup counsel rather than us. Our work is single-member and multi-member LLCs for founders outside the US who are building a business rather than raising a round.