It Costs $35 to Start a Montana LLC and $199 to Renew With ZenBusiness

Written by a competitor, and stated as such before the argument begins. Montana Registered Agent.co sells the service under comparison here at $99 a year, and we gain if you move. The ZenBusiness figures are ZenBusiness's own, advertised publicly, recorded during a July 2026 verification pass and left unedited.

The Platform, Credited Properly

ZenBusiness ships the best software in this category. No hedging on that point: the dashboard is coherent, the navigation is obvious on first contact, and a new owner can find their way around without asking for help. Real design costs real money, and the right buyer should pay it.

Our product is deliberately smaller. One Montana seat. One invoice a year. Nothing to log into except a document portal.

Two Prices, and Only One of Them Is Yours

Purchased standalone, without a formation package attached:

• First year: $99 plus state fees
• Every year after: $199

Both numbers are published, and neither is hidden from anyone who scrolls. The point is not concealment. The point is which figure describes a long-term obligation. Montana requires an agent for as long as the entity exists on the register, so the recurring number is the real price, and the recurring number is $199.

The State's Own Numbers, for Scale

Montana runs one of the cheapest entity regimes in the country, and that context reframes what a $199 line item actually is.

Articles of Organization, the filing that brings a company into existence under Mont. Code Ann. § 35-8-201, are priced at $35 on the Secretary of State's published fee schedule, among the lowest formation charges any state sets, with another $50 attached to every series member you name in a series LLC. Changing the registered agent on the record costs nothing. An on-time annual report currently costs nothing, because the standard $20 fee is waived for filings made by April 15 through 2027.

One ZenBusiness renewal exceeds the cost of organizing five separate Montana limited liability companies. In a state that asks this little, the agent invoice is not one entry in a compliance budget. It is very nearly the entire budget, which is a reasonable argument for reading it closely.

Row One, Itemized

• $99 at signup and $99 at every renewal, with no scheduled step up
• Service of process scanned and forwarded on the day it lands here
• A Montana street address of the kind the statute demands, never a post office box
• Documents held in a portal, reachable from any device at any hour
• April 15 tracked and flagged in advance
• A single item at checkout, with nothing to decline

Accuracy before persuasion: $99 is not the lowest published price in Montana. BetterLegal shows $90. Ours belongs to the low band of published Montana rates and holds steady at renewal, which is a narrower claim and a defensible one.

The Filing That Ends a ZenBusiness Appointment

Montana calls it a Statement of Change. A single filing rewrites the office line, the agent line, or both. No form number exists to look up. Montana does not print business forms at all; every filing has run through the Secretary of State's online portal since 2017, entered with an ePass Montana account. The Business Services Division processes it, and the state's fee schedule carries no charge against that line.

The statement substitutes one agent for another inside a single entry, which only works if the incoming agent already exists. So the order runs: enroll first, file second, check the listing third, and close the ZenBusiness account fourth, so that a $199 renewal never posts against a service you have already replaced. Our Montana change of agent page sets out the fields and the verification step.

Order Here

Nine services priced side by side sit in our Montana price schedule.