Why I Built WyomingLLC (A Founder's Note)

The 40-second version

I built WyomingLLC after watching the non-resident LLC market overcharge founders by 3-7x for years. The state of Wyoming charges $100 to file the Articles of Organization, the IRS issues an EIN for free, and the paperwork is genuinely straightforward. Yet the established players bill $1,000-$2,000 for the same core work. We charge $397 all-inclusive (Wyoming state fee included) and tell you the truth about banking and taxes, even when the truth costs us the sale.

Want the formation done right at a fair price? WyomingLLC is $397 all-inclusive, ships in about 24 hours, and includes the Wyoming filing fee, EIN, registered agent for 12 months, a custom operating agreement, and Mercury/Relay/Wise introductions. ITIN is a separate $297 add-on only if you actually need one.

How I got here

I was a founder in Dhaka trying to take payments from US customers. The standard advice everywhere was the same: form a US LLC, get an EIN, open Mercury, plug in Stripe. So I started shopping for someone to form the company.

The quotes came back fast and they were all over the place. doola's full-compliance package ran toward $1,999/year. Firstbase looked cheap at the headline ($399 formation) until you added the registered agent, a US address, tax filing, and a legal add-on, at which point a fully-loaded first year cleared $1,700. Stripe Atlas was a flat $500 but Delaware-only and rigid about almost everything. None of these prices matched the work being done underneath them.

Here is what was actually under the hood. The Wyoming Secretary of State charges $100 to file Articles of Organization (plus a small online convenience fee), per the Wyoming Secretary of State. The IRS issues an Employer Identification Number for free if you mail or fax Form SS-4. A registered agent in Wyoming is a commodity service that costs the provider very little. The operating agreement for a single-member LLC is a near-template document. Add it all up and the real cost of forming a non-resident Wyoming LLC is a couple hundred dollars of state fees and a few hours of careful work.

I formed mine through a smaller provider for around $400, and the formation itself was fine. The experience around it was not. Slow responses, no clear explanation of Form 5472, and zero help when my first bank application stalled. I figured the rest out myself over months of late nights reading the IRS website and banking forums. By the time I understood the full picture, founders in my network kept asking how I'd done it. I started helping them, then started charging, then the team grew. Eventually it made sense to build a real brand. That is WyomingLLC.

What the market actually charges (and what it costs)

I want to show the gap with real numbers rather than asking you to take my word for it. The table below is the genuine cost stack for forming and running a single non-resident Wyoming LLC, next to common provider pricing as of 2026. Provider figures are drawn from public pricing and the comparison write-ups linked at the end.

The Wyoming annual report is a $60 minimum license tax for companies with under $300,000 of in-state assets, due the first day of your formation anniversary month, per the Wyoming Secretary of State annual report system. Wyoming has no state income tax and no franchise tax. So the recurring cost of keeping a Wyoming LLC alive is small and predictable. When a provider charges $1,999/year to "maintain" it, the overwhelming majority of that is margin on services most single-member non-resident LLCs do not use.

What I wish I had known

The non-resident LLC market is full of friction that exists mostly because the incumbents profit from it. Four patterns stood out to me.

The premium-tier upsell

Most formation companies steer you toward a $1,500-$2,000 package that bundles services you will not use. Compliance monitoring for a business with nothing to monitor. Bookkeeping for a company that has not made a sale yet. Tax filing for a year in which US tax owed is genuinely zero. The packaging is designed so the "responsible" choice looks like the expensive one.

The banking black box

Several providers charge for "banking assistance" that is, in practice, forwarding your application to Mercury. The thing they cannot tell you, because it is not theirs to control, is the approval decision. Mercury decides that, not the intermediary. In practice, Mercury approves a meaningful share of non-resident applicants - generally higher for UK, EU, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, and UAE founders, and meaningfully lower for sanctioned or restricted countries - but approval is its decision and is never guaranteed. Anyone "guaranteeing" approval is selling you something they do not own.

The Delaware bias

Y Combinator and Stripe Atlas push Delaware hard, and for a venture-track startup raising priced rounds, that is the right call. But for the typical non-resident solo founder running an agency, an e-commerce brand, or a SaaS, Delaware costs more every year (a $300 annual franchise tax floor plus registered agent) without delivering anything they will use. Wyoming's $60 license tax is the cheaper, simpler home for most of them.

The silence around Form 5472

This is the one that genuinely angers me. Many providers never clearly explain Form 5472, and customers discover it at year two when an IRS notice arrives. So let me be the person who tells you plainly.

Form 5472: the federal filing nobody warned me about

A foreign-owned single-member US LLC is treated as a disregarded entity for US federal tax. That does not mean "no filing." It means you file a pro-forma Form 1120 with Form 5472 attached for any year you have a "reportable transaction" with a related party, which includes ordinary things like you funding the LLC or the LLC paying money back to you. This is an information return, not necessarily a tax bill, but it is mandatory.

The penalty is the headline. Per the IRS Instructions for Form 5472, failure to file the form when due (or to keep the required records) triggers a $25,000 penalty. If the failure continues more than 90 days after the IRS notifies you, an additional $25,000 applies for each 30-day period, with no stated maximum. A separate Form 5472 is required for each related party, so the exposure compounds.

Here is the honest framing. Many single-member non-resident LLCs owe zero US income tax, because the income is not effectively connected to a US trade or business and the owner has no US tax presence. But owing zero tax and having zero filing obligation are different things. You can owe nothing and still face a $25,000 penalty purely for not filing an information return. That asymmetry is exactly why we put Form 5472 on the table on day one, not at renewal.

Why Wyoming, specifically - beyond the price

Price is the headline, but it is not the only reason I built this on Wyoming rather than another low-cost state. Two structural features matter for the kind of founder this is built for, and both are verifiable rather than marketing.

The first is public-record privacy. Wyoming does not list LLC members or managers in the Articles of Organization that sit on the public Secretary of State record; the registered agent appears there, not you. For a non-resident who does not want their home address and name indexed in a foreign government's searchable business database, that is a genuine structural difference from states that publish ownership. It is worth being precise about what this privacy is not: it is not a shield against legitimate disclosure to banks, the IRS, or a court. A bank will still verify who actually owns the company during onboarding. State-record privacy and institutional transparency coexist.

The second is the federal beneficial-ownership picture, which changed recently enough that most older guides get it wrong. Under FinCEN's March 26, 2025 interim final rule, domestic US entities - including a Wyoming LLC formed by a foreign owner - are exempt from Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act (FinCEN - Beneficial Ownership Information). In 2024 this was a live, looming obligation that providers were charging to handle; in 2025 the rule shifted. I mention it because conflating BOI with Form 5472 is one of the most common sources of confusion I see - they are different filings with different status, and a guide that still describes BOI as mandatory for a domestic LLC is out of date.

Neither of these is something a provider can charge a premium to "unlock." They are properties of the state and of federal rules. The work a good provider does is filing correctly and explaining what applies; it is not gatekeeping access to advantages that already exist in the law.

What "a fair price" actually means here

I want to be careful not to turn "we are cheaper" into its own kind of marketing dishonesty, because cheap is not automatically fair. A fair price, the way I think about it, is one that covers the real cost of doing the work well - including the review time on a high-liability filing, the support that answers a panicked founder before a banking deadline, and the education that prevents a problem rather than charging to clean it up - plus a margin modest enough that the business survives without needing to upsell things you do not use. That is a different claim than "lowest number wins." A price that is too low to fund careful review on a $25,000-penalty filing is not a bargain; it is a hidden risk transferred to you. So when I criticize the incumbents' pricing, the objection is not that they make margin - it is that the margin is attached to bundled services most single-member non-resident founders never touch, packaged so the expensive choice masquerades as the responsible one.

What I want WyomingLLC to be

Three commitments sit underneath every decision we make.

1. Honest pricing. $397 all-inclusive, with the Wyoming state fee included rather than tacked on at checkout. Year two onward is roughly $160 (the $60 annual report plus registered agent renewal). No hidden add-on ladder. The only optional extras are clearly priced: Form 5472 + 1120 filing at $99/year if you want us to handle it, and an ITIN application at $297 one-time if you actually need one. ITIN is genuinely separate because most founders do not need it.

2. Honest banking guidance. We tell a founder from Nigeria that Mercury approval for their country profile is materially lower and that Wise Business or Payoneer may be the realistic path. We tell a founder from the UK they will likely breeze through. We do not promise outcomes we cannot control, and we do not charge as if we can.

3. Honest tax guidance. We will tell you Form 5472 is mandatory and what the penalty is. We will explain how to file it yourself if you would rather not pay us. We would rather lose a $99 add-on than have you find out about the obligation from an IRS letter.

And where we are not the best fit, I want to say so out loud. If you are raising venture capital, Stripe Atlas on Delaware probably fits you better. If you want full white-glove bookkeeping and compliance handled for you, doola has a more mature product for that and I will point you there. We are built for founders who want the formation done right at a fair price and prefer to learn the operating details from clear guides. In our experience that describes most non-resident founders.

The non-resident reality, end to end

If you are forming from outside the US, here is the full sequence as I understand it after living through it, so you can see there is no magic in what providers charge a premium for.

1. Form the LLC. File Articles of Organization with Wyoming. You do not need to be in the US, hold a visa, or have a Social Security Number. A Wyoming LLC also gives you genuine privacy: members and managers are not listed in the public filing.
2. Get the EIN. Without an SSN, the EIN is obtained by faxing Form SS-4 to the IRS. This is the step that trips up DIY founders most often and the one a good provider earns its fee on.
3. Open banking. Apply to Mercury first. If declined, Relay is the next stop, and Wise Business has the broadest country acceptance of the three. None require a US visit. The decision is the bank's, not your formation company's.
4. Connect payments. Stripe and PayPal both work with a US LLC + EIN. Stripe is not billed by us; you set it up directly.
5. Handle US tax. File Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120 annually if you have reportable transactions. Separately, a Form W-8BEN-E is what you give to US payers so they understand your foreign status. Many single-member owners owe no US income tax, but the 5472 filing still applies.
6. Stay compliant in Wyoming. File the $60 annual report each year and keep your registered agent current. Miss the deadline and Wyoming will administratively dissolve the LLC roughly 60 days later.

What we are working on next

The roadmap I care most about for the next 12 months:

• Multi-language support, starting with Bengali since we are partly based in Dhaka, then Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic.
• A banking-outcome database: real, anonymized data on Mercury, Relay, and Wise approval by country profile and business model, so the guidance we give stops being anecdotal and becomes measured.
• An open, free non-resident US LLC handbook, published on GitHub, so the knowledge is not paywalled.
• Better video, because text guides are SEO-friendly but a first-time founder often just wants to watch someone do the steps.

The goal is not to be the biggest operator in this category. It is to be the one non-resident founders actually trust. There is room for both.

Sources

• Wyoming Secretary of State - Business FAQs
• Wyoming Secretary of State - Annual Report system
• IRS - Instructions for Form 5472
• IRS - About Form 5472
• Stripe Atlas vs Firstbase vs Doola vs Bizee pricing comparison (2026)

• • Founder, WyomingLLC. I read customer notes personally during NYC + Dhaka business hours.*