A Legal Platform, or Just the Agent

A conflict worth naming immediately: California Registered Agent.ai owns this page and competes directly with Rocket Lawyer on the agent line item. Their pricing below is published and verifiable independently of us.

$125 on Every Tier, With No Introductory Rate

Registered agent service is priced at $125 per year, and our review found that figure unchanged at every membership level. No teaser term, no tier-conditional discount, no billing cycle requiring conversion before comparison. In a category where introductory pricing is close to universal, that consistency is a positive finding and we record it as one.

What the Bundle Includes That You May Never Open

Rocket Lawyer's product is a legal services platform: document templates, attorney consultations, an ongoing subscription premised on repeat use. Agent service is one module within it. For a buyer who uses the templates quarterly and the attorney access occasionally, the bundle is efficient and the pricing is fair.

For a buyer who needs only the statutory function, the same $125 finances a surface area that goes untouched. That is a scope mismatch rather than a pricing failure, and the distinction matters: the question is not whether Rocket Lawyer charges too much for what it sells, but whether what it sells matches what you came to buy.

The final row is the entire decision. Twenty-six dollars a year is a low price for platform access that gets used and a poor one for platform access that does not.

The Unbundled California Rate

$99 annually, unchanged at renewal, covering the statutory role and the handling around it. Service is accepted, imaged the same business day, and released to the client with a timestamped record of receipt. The agent field of your filing carries our California street address rather than a residential one. Biennial Statement of Information alerts are included. One disclosed extra exists: $15 per item for scanning non-legal mail.

Ninety-nine dollars is not the floor of this market. BetterLegal publishes $90. Our rate ranks among the lowest in California and covers the statutory role in full.

Who California Permits in the Role, and How to Install Them

California restricts this appointment more tightly than most states, which makes the eligibility question worth settling before the filing question.

Under Cal. Corp. Code § 17701.13, an LLC has to keep a California office in place continuously, together with an agent for service of process. Two categories qualify. The first is an individual who resides in California, reachable at an in-state street address during business hours. The second is a corporation that has filed the certificate described at Corp. Code § 1505 and whose capacity to act has not terminated. Your own entity is excluded, the Secretary of State's guidance stating plainly that a company may not appoint itself to the role.

There is a privacy consequence buried in the difference between those two categories, and it is specific to California. An individual agent's California street address is set out in the filing and becomes part of the public entity record. A corporation designated under § 1505 has no address printed in the filing whatsoever. Choosing the second category therefore removes an address from the public file rather than merely substituting one.

Installing the replacement takes one document, and it is not the one most guides describe. California publishes no change of agent form. The appointment is updated by filing a revised Statement of Information at bizfileOnline, LLC-12 in the case of a limited liability company, with the incoming agent named. The state charges $0 when that statement arrives clear of a scheduled filing period, and the usual $20 when it accompanies the biennial one. The statute says keep the designation in place at all times, and the practical reading is hire first, file second, so the role passes from one holder to the next inside a single entry. What you do about a Rocket Lawyer subscription afterward is a separate decision on your own schedule. Our change of agent page sets out the sequence.

Order Here Eligibility and price for all nine providers are set out in the California rankings. Contact us to confirm details.