The Open-Source US LLC Handbook Is Live on GitHub

Why open-source a formation handbook at all

Most US LLC formation companies treat their internal knowledge as the moat. The reasoning is intuitive: if customers knew exactly how to file Articles of Organization, request an EIN without an SSN, prepare a clean Mercury application, and file Form 5472, why would they pay anyone?

We think that reasoning is backwards for three concrete reasons.

First, the information is not actually secret. The Wyoming filing process is published by the Wyoming Secretary of State. The EIN process is an IRS Form SS-4. Form 5472 instructions are a free PDF on irs.gov. The BOI exemption is a FinCEN interim final rule in the Federal Register. None of this is proprietary. Pretending otherwise insults the reader and, worse, leaves a vacuum that gets filled by outdated forum posts and confident-but-wrong AI answers.

Second, the bottleneck for most non-resident founders is not knowledge - it is execution risk and time. Knowing that you need an EIN is easy. Filing Form SS-4 correctly as a non-resident with no SSN, getting it to the right IRS fax line or international phone process, waiting out the timeline, and not tripping a downstream banking rejection is the hard part. A handbook reduces confusion. A service reduces effort and the cost of a mistake. Those are different products, and one promotes the other.

Third, open-source content is durable distribution. A 50,000-word, openly licensed (CC BY 4.0), forkable reference attracts links, gets cited, gets translated, and survives algorithm changes in a way that gated PDFs never do. If even a small fraction of readers eventually decide they would rather pay $397 than spend three weeks doing it themselves, the economics work. We are explicit about that incentive rather than hiding it.

The 30 chapters at a glance

The handbook is organized into seven blocks. Here is the full map.

The decision layer comes first deliberately. The most expensive mistakes we see are not filing errors - they are people forming the wrong entity in the wrong state for their situation, then paying to unwind it. A UK founder planning a priced equity round next year probably wants a Delaware C-Corp, not a Wyoming LLC, and the handbook says so in Chapter 3 rather than steering everyone toward the thing we happen to sell.

What the handbook gets factually right (and keeps current)

A handbook is only worth open-sourcing if the facts are correct on the day you read it. Here are the load-bearing numbers, each tied to a primary source, exactly as they appear in the relevant chapters as of this release.

Wyoming formation and annual cost

The Wyoming Secretary of State charges a $100 filing fee for Articles of Organization for an LLC, a fee that has been stable since the 2021 fee schedule. The annual report license tax is $60 minimum (technically the greater of $60 or two-tenths of one mill - $0.0002 - on Wyoming-located assets), and it is due on the first day of your LLC's anniversary month, not a fixed calendar date (Source: Wyoming Secretary of State). Chapter 2 walks through why this $60/year floor, combined with no state income tax and no franchise tax, is the reason Wyoming wins on long-run cost for most non-residents versus Nevada or California.

For context, our own service is $397 all-inclusive with the Wyoming state filing fee included - formation, registered agent for year one, operating agreement, EIN application, and bank introductions. The handbook tells you how to do every one of those steps yourself; the $397 is for not having to.

Form 5472 - the highest-stakes annual filing

Every foreign-owned single-member LLC treated as a disregarded entity must file Form 5472 attached to a pro forma Form 1120 for any year in which it has a reportable transaction with a related party (which, for most founders, includes capital contributions and owner distributions). The penalty for failing to file a complete and correct Form 5472 is $25,000 per form, with an additional $25,000 for each 30-day period the failure continues beyond 90 days after IRS notice (Source: IRS Instructions for Form 5472). For 2025 tax-year filings, the deadline is April 15, 2026, extendable to October 15, 2026 by filing Form 7004. Chapters 14–16 are the most-revised section of the handbook precisely because the stakes are highest here.

BOI / Corporate Transparency Act status

This one changed dramatically in 2025, and stale guides still get it wrong. Under FinCEN's interim final rule published March 26, 2025, all entities created in the United States - including Wyoming LLCs - and their beneficial owners are exempt from BOI reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act. The revised definition of "reporting company" now covers only foreign-formed entities registered to do business in a US state (Source: FinCEN; Federal Register, 90 FR 13688). The handbook flags this as an interim final rule that FinCEN intends to finalize, which is exactly the kind of "this could change" caveat a static PDF never updates.

Banking and payments reality

A US LLC and an EIN do not entitle you to a US bank account; the bank's own KYC underwriting does. Chapters 7–13 cover Mercury, Relay, and Wise application sequencing, what triggers rejections (incomplete entity documents, vague business descriptions, sanctioned-country residency, mismatched addresses), and how Stripe US onboarding interacts with all of it. We do not promise approval anywhere in the handbook, because no one honestly can - these are private companies setting their own risk appetite.

A non-resident-specific reading path

If you are reading the handbook cold as a non-US founder, do not read it front to back. Use this sequence, which mirrors the actual order of operations:

1. Confirm you need an LLC (Chapters 1, 3). If you are a freelancer with one client and no liability exposure, you may not. The handbook says so.
2. Pick the state (Chapter 2). Wyoming for cost and privacy; Delaware only if you are raising priced equity soon; Florida/others only with a specific local connection.
3. Form the entity and get the EIN (Chapters 4–5). EIN without an SSN runs on a timeline measured in weeks, not minutes - plan for it.
4. Open banking (Chapters 7–10). Prepare the application before you apply. Have your formation documents, EIN letter, a clear business description, and a real website ready.
5. Set up payments (Chapters 11–13). Stripe, then alternatives if Stripe declines.
6. Calendar your compliance (Chapters 14–16). Form 5472 by April 15, FBAR if you cross the $10,000 aggregate foreign-account threshold, Wyoming annual report on your anniversary month.
7. Read your country chapter (Chapters 17–26) for treaty position and home-country reporting.

A worked path through the handbook

Suppose you are a freelance product designer in Lagos with three recurring US clients who have started asking for a US entity and a US bank account before they will keep paying you. Reading the handbook cold, your path is short and specific. Chapter 1 first asks whether you even need an LLC; with recurring US clients and a desire for a US bank account, the answer is plausibly yes, so you continue. Chapter 2 points you to Wyoming for cost and privacy unless you have a reason to be elsewhere - you do not, so Wyoming it is. Chapters 4 and 5 walk you through the Articles of Organization and the EIN-without-an-SSN process, and they set the expectation that the EIN is a multi-week wait, so you start it before you need it rather than after a client deadline. Chapter 7 onward prepares your Mercury application; your Nigeria country chapter (within Chapters 17–26) warns that Nigerian residency is a harder banking profile and tells you to have Wise Business ready as the fallback rather than treating a Mercury decline as a dead end. Finally, Chapter 14 puts the Form 5472 deadline on your calendar the day your LLC is formed, because the obligation attaches in year one. The point of the worked path is that the handbook is not a 50,000-word wall to read end to end - for any given founder it is a short, ordered route, and the table of contents is built to surface that route quickly.

The country chapters and tax treaties

The country guides exist because US federal rules are uniform but their interaction with your home country is not. Whether the US has an income tax treaty with your country affects withholding on certain US-source payments and your double-taxation relief at home. India, the UK, the UAE-via-domestic-law, and others each get a dedicated chapter. Brazil, which has no comprehensive US income tax treaty, gets a chapter explaining what that absence means in practice. We deliberately did not write a chapter for every country on Earth - we wrote the ten that account for the bulk of non-resident founder demand, and we accept pull requests for the rest.

The license, in plain terms

The handbook prose ships under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) - the conventional license for documentation and written works - while the bundled code snippets, templates, and scripts are released under the MIT license. (We started out planning to put everything under MIT, then corrected course: MIT is written around "the Software" and is awkward for a 50,000-word book, so CC BY 4.0 is the right tool for the prose.) In plain language, the license lets you:

• Use the handbook for any purpose, including commercial.
• Copy and redistribute it, in whole or in part.
• Modify it - correct it, condense it, expand it.
• Translate it into any language.
• Republish derivative works, even paid ones.

The only real obligation is attribution: keep the copyright and attribution notice. We retain copyright but grant these broad rights irrevocably for the released versions. Yes, this means someone can fork the handbook, rebrand it, and use it to market a competing formation service. We considered that and decided it is fine. If a competitor's best move is to copy our free reference, the reference is doing its job, and our actual product - fast, all-inclusive execution at $397 - is not something a fork can clone.

One thing the license does not do: turn the handbook into legal or tax advice. It is an information resource. For high-value transactions, multiple-entity structures, or anything unusual, the handbook tells you to consult a US CPA or attorney rather than relying on a Markdown file.

What the handbook deliberately leaves out

Being open about the gaps is part of being a trustworthy reference. The handbook does not try to be a US tax-return preparation course; it explains what Form 5472 and the pro forma 1120 are, what they cost you if you miss them, and how a standard single-member case looks, but it stops short of walking you through an unusual return line by line, because that is genuinely a job for a CPA. It does not cover multi-member LLC partnership returns (Form 1065) in depth, since the foreign-owned single-member case is what the bulk of our readers have and conflating the two is a common way bad guides go wrong. It does not give home-country tax advice beyond flagging the treaty position, because we are not qualified to tell a reader in Brazil or India how their local return works - their own accountant is. And it does not promise bank approval anywhere, because no honest document can. Naming these boundaries matters: a reader who knows exactly where the handbook stops knows exactly where to bring in a professional, which is more useful than a guide that pretends to cover everything and quietly gets the edges wrong.

How we keep it from rotting: the update cadence

The single biggest failure mode for any tax-and-banking guide is going stale. The BOI reversal is the clearest example - an enormous number of "2024" guides still tell US LLC owners to file a BOI report that is no longer required. We try to avoid that with a few mechanisms:

• Quarterly review. Every quarter we walk the federal-compliance and banking chapters against primary sources and the banks' current policy pages.
• Issue-driven fixes. Because the repo is public, a reader who spots an error can open a GitHub issue. Public errors get fixed faster than private ones.
• Dated facts. Load-bearing figures are stated with their source and effective context so you can tell whether a number is current when you read it.
• Change log. The repo keeps a CHANGELOG so you can see what moved and when, which matters for a document people may have forked months earlier.

This is also why we publish the regulatory facts with citations rather than as bare assertions. A claim like "the Form 5472 penalty is $25,000" is only useful if you can click through to the IRS instructions and confirm it still says that. Citations are not decoration; they are how a community-maintained document stays honest.

How to contribute (translations especially)

The highest-value contributions are translations. A non-resident founder in Dhaka or São Paulo or Lagos is often reading US tax rules in their second or third language, and a faithful translation of Chapter 14 is worth more to that person than another English blog post. Our priority languages, based on where demand concentrates, are Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and Arabic. To contribute:

1. Fork the repo on GitHub.
2. Copy the relevant English chapter into the language directory.
3. Translate, preserving the citations and the "consult a professional" caveats verbatim - do not localize away the legal disclaimers.
4. Open a pull request.

We also take content fixes and updates: a changed bank policy, a corrected deadline, a clearer explanation. Contributors are acknowledged in the README. We do not pay for contributions; the exchange is attribution and a better shared resource.

How this handbook relates to our other free tools

The handbook (CC BY 4.0) is the anchor of a small set of free, openly licensed resources that share the same philosophy - the interactive tools and templates ship under MIT. The Form 5472 template pack gives pre-filled field examples for common business types so self-filers can see realistic values. The country × state decision tree turns Chapters 1–3 into an interactive flow. The cost calculator projects multi-year costs across providers. Each is a narrower, more actionable slice of what the handbook covers in prose. Use the handbook to understand why; use the tools to execute the how.

When to use the handbook vs. when to hire someone

To be direct about the trade-off the handbook itself makes:

Use the handbook and do it yourself if you have time, you enjoy administrative process, your situation is standard (single-member LLC, common business type, treaty or non-treaty country covered in the guides), and a multi-week EIN timeline is not a problem for your launch.

Use a service if your time is worth more than the fee, you want one accountable point of contact when something goes sideways with the IRS or a bank, or a downstream mistake (a botched EIN, a rejected bank application, a missed Form 5472) would cost you far more than the formation fee. Our version of that service is $397, state fee included; the handbook is the reason you can verify we are not hiding anything in it.

Either way, the handbook is free, and it will stay free. github.com/wyomingllc/handbook.