LegalZoom's $249 Renews Itself. South Carolina's $10 Filing Has to Be Done on Purpose.

South Carolina Registered Agent.co wrote this page, sells the competing service at $99 a year, and would like your business. We think you should know that before the first argument rather than after the last one. The LegalZoom pricing quoted throughout is what LegalZoom published as of a July 2026 review, unedited.

The Brand Is Worth Something

Twenty-plus years in the market, a support organization with actual staff, attorney services sold beside the filing products, and enough name recognition that a first-time owner can hand over a card without spending an evening on research. That last item has genuine value. Anxiety costs people something, and paying to remove it is a rational purchase.

We are not going to argue that LegalZoom does the job badly. We are going to argue about the size of the number and what it is attached to.

$249, Automatic, Every Year

LegalZoom's registered agent service is $249 annually in South Carolina, on automatic renewal, and our July 2026 review located no opening discount or promotional first year anywhere in the structure. The rate you see is the rate that repeats.

Credit for the consistency, honestly. What we would draw your attention to instead is the auto-renewal itself, because it changes the shape of the decision. A price that renews on its own requires a deliberate act to stop. A price you actively pay each year gets reconsidered each year by default. Over a decade that difference decides how many times anyone looks at the line at all.

What the Extra $150 a Year Does Not Buy

It does not buy standing. South Carolina applies one set of expectations to every registered agent operating here regardless of what the company charges: a qualifying presence in the state, a real street address rather than a box, availability during business hours, and prompt handover of anything that arrives. A $249 agent and a $99 agent are held to those same expectations, and the public record shows the same kind of entry for both.

It does not buy speed either, at least not compared with us. A summons delivered to our South Carolina office is imaged and released to your account inside the same business day, with an email going out at the moment it posts, because a response deadline in this state runs from service and not from the day someone finally opens the mail.

The $150 buys recognition. Whether recognition is worth that annually is a judgment only the person paying can make, and some people will decide yes.

Everything We Charge, In One Place

$99 a year for the agent appointment, the South Carolina address on your public filing, same-day scanning of legal process and state correspondence, notifications, and the document archive. $15 per item if you also want us handling ordinary business mail, which is optional and is the only other line we have. Nothing else, no tiers, no setup charge.

For accuracy: BetterLegal's $90 undercuts our $99. Low end of the published South Carolina range is the honest description of where we sit, not the bottom of it, and the useful part is that our low figure is also our renewal figure.

The Paperwork Behind a LegalZoom-to-Us Move in South Carolina

Here is the whole of it, so nothing feels uncertain.

The document. One notice, and the state's own title for it names each thing it can alter: the designated office, the agent, and the street address of a registered agent. There is no form number to look up, because Secretary of State forms in this state are not numbered at all. They are identified by their titles. If some checklist tells you to file South Carolina form such-and-such, that checklist was written about a different state.

The fee. Ten dollars, fixed by S.C. Code § 33-44-1204(a)(9), the line in the state fee schedule covering a change to the designated office or to the agent for service of process, or to both together.

The route. Mail the completed paper form to the South Carolina Secretary of State, or enter the same change inside Business Entities Online at businessfilings.sc.gov. Both are official, both cost ten dollars, and LegalZoom is not asked to consent to either.

What it asks for. Your entity name, the designated office and agent currently on record, and the name and South Carolina street address of the agent replacing them.

The order. Appoint first. The notice requires an incoming agent and gives you no way to file a vacancy, which follows from the state treating the appointment as something maintained without interruption rather than reviewed periodically. Enrol with us, we prepare the notice carrying our details, you submit it with the ten dollar fee, the state's business search confirms the new entry, and the LegalZoom subscription gets switched off after that rather than before it.

When. As soon as convenient. An auto-renewing subscription rewards early action, since the ten dollars is fixed and the $249 is not.

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