ZenBusiness Renews at $199. Michigan Charges $5 to Leave.

Disclosure before the argument starts: this page belongs to MI Registered Agent.org, and the Michigan resident agent service we sell at $99 a year is the product standing opposite ZenBusiness in everything below. Discount our judgments accordingly. The ZenBusiness figures are a different category of statement, since they are that company's own posted rates, recorded in July 2026 exactly as published.

Credit Where the Platform Earns It

ZenBusiness has built the strongest software in this category, and denying it would cost this page its credibility by the second paragraph. The dashboard is clean, the compliance calendar is legible, and formation records, state deadlines, and incoming agent mail all sit behind one login. An owner who wants a console for the entire company is buying something that genuinely exists. We do not offer a console. We offer one Michigan agent seat, worked carefully, with nothing else on the invoice.

$99 Opens the Account. $199 Keeps It Open.

Bought as a standalone product instead of riding along with a formation order, ZenBusiness resident agent coverage runs $99 plus state fees to open, then $199 for every year that follows. Both figures are published. Neither is a trick. The trouble is that shoppers weigh the opening figure against everyone else's permanent figure, and those are two different kinds of number.

Michigan leaves the recurrence nowhere to hide. Under MCL 450.4207 an LLC has to keep a registered office and a resident agent in place continuously for as long as it remains on the state's rolls, so the agent line on your record is never vacant and never unbilled. The figure worth planning around is therefore the one that repeats. It also buys the identical statutory duty a cheaper provider owes: hold a Michigan street address and receive what is delivered there.

Four hundred dollars of daylight across five years, for a job Michigan defines the same way regardless of who holds it.

One Figure, Repeated

Our plan contains a single number. $99 covers a year, and the renewal invoice reads $99 because a second tier was never built into the model. Inside that price: legal process delivered to our Michigan office is scanned into your portal before that business day closes, an email alert fires the moment the scan posts, our street address fills the resident agent line on your LARA record so your home address stays off it, and a reminder reaches you ahead of the February 15 annual statement. A single optional charge exists. $15 buys a scan of one piece of routine business mail, and that is the only thing in the account priced apart from the $99. You read it here, before ordering, rather than discovering it later.

Cheapest in Michigan is the one claim we have to decline. BetterLegal advertises $90 a year, nine dollars under our rate, and a page arguing about pricing candor cannot then round that inconvenience away. What holds up: $99 sits among the lowest flat annual rates available in Michigan, and among the very few that still reads $99 in year six.

Moving the Appointment Off ZenBusiness: One Certificate, Five Dollars

Michigan handles this on a single sheet. Form CSCL/CD-520 is the certificate that records a new registered office, a new resident agent, or both changes at once, and one numbered form serves corporations and LLCs alike, so there is no entity-specific variant to hunt down. It goes to LARA's Corporations Division with a $5 payment.

Notice what that fee does not do. Many states discount the electronic channel and surcharge paper, or arrange the penalty the other way around. Michigan charges five dollars either way. The state holds no financial preference about how the document reaches it, which removes the last practical excuse for postponing a change you have already decided to make.

Order of operations matters more than speed, and it runs in one direction only. The certificate carries a line for the incoming resident agent, so the replacement has to be engaged before the form can be completed at all. Put the incoming agent under contract, submit the certificate, watch for the update to appear on your state record, and close the ZenBusiness account only after that. Reverse those steps and your record shows an agent line you have already abandoned, which is exactly the condition Michigan's continuous maintenance rule is written to rule out. Our Michigan change of agent guide walks the form box by box.

Nothing in the state calendar forces this filing, which is precisely why it drifts for years. The $199 does not announce itself either. It just appears on the statement. Deal with it in the billing month before your ZenBusiness anniversary rather than the one after.

Order Here

Nine Michigan services with their published annual prices appear in our price docket.