ZenBusiness Costs $99, Then $199. Your South Carolina Filing Does Not Change in Year Two.

You are on a competitor's page. South Carolina Registered Agent.co charges $99 a year for the same appointment ZenBusiness would sell you, and we benefit if this argument lands. The ZenBusiness prices below are ZenBusiness's own, taken from its published pages in July 2026 and quoted without commentary attached to the figures themselves.

Start With What They Got Right

The software is good. That is not a grudging concession, it is the honest read: ZenBusiness invested in an interface where your filings, your documents, and your reminders sit in one place and behave the way a modern app should behave. First-time owners find their way around it. Support is reachable. If you want a compliance platform and an agent inside it, this is a reasonable company to buy one from.

We are not that. We are one product with one price.

The Number That Applies to Most of Your Years

Buy agent service from ZenBusiness on its own, with no formation order attached, and year one runs $99 plus state fees. Renewals after that are $199 apiece.

Neither figure is hidden and both are published. The thing to be careful about is which one you are planning around, because this state wants an agent on record for every day the company stays registered, and a company that survives is a company that renews. Year one is the exception in your own history with this vendor. Year two onward is the rule.

Two Entries, One Address, One Price

Something worth knowing about what either company is actually covering.

Your South Carolina filing carries two address entries rather than one. The first names your agent for service of process. The second names a designated office the company must maintain inside the state, and the statute pointedly does not require that office to be anywhere you conduct business. A commercial agent supplies one street address that satisfies both, which is why the designated office almost never comes up in a sales conversation even though it is half of what the state asked for.

The relevant consequence is that the job is defined by South Carolina, not by the vendor. A $199 renewal and a $99 renewal are being measured against the identical requirement: a real street address in the state, someone present at it during working hours, and prompt delivery of whatever turns up. The premium is buying software around the address, not a stronger address.

What Our $99 Puts on Those Two Lines

• A South Carolina street address that stands in your public record where your home or office address would otherwise be
• Same-business-day imaging of anything served on your company, posted to your dashboard with an email pushed out as it lands
• Correspondence from the Secretary of State handled on the same schedule as legal process
• A document history you can open whenever you need it, including years later
• $99 the day you sign up and $99 on each renewal after, with no tier stacked above it

Nine dollars below us sits BetterLegal at $90, so read our figure as low rather than lowest, and as permanent rather than introductory. That is the whole of the claim we will defend.

Your ZenBusiness Handoff, and What South Carolina Charges for It

Ten dollars, one notice, delivered to the South Carolina Secretary of State by post or submitted electronically. The form, the fee statute, and the four steps in sequence are all on our change of agent page.

The point we will make here rather than there concerns timing. Appoint us before you cancel anything. South Carolina expects the agent line to be occupied continuously, the notice has nowhere to record an empty appointment, and the days a filing spends in transit are still days your company is on the public record. So the order is enrol, file, confirm, and only then let the ZenBusiness renewal go.

You can start that on any day of the year. Starting it a month before a $199 renewal date is simply cheaper than starting it a week after.

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