Methodology v1

How we rank, research, and revise.

Every page on Incorporator follows the same pipeline. We document it so the judgement calls can be audited.

1. Sources

State filing fees come from the primary Secretary of State source for each jurisdiction. Service pricing comes from the public checkout flow on the service's own site, captured on the date shown in the “Updated” stamp. We do not rely on the service's marketing page for the headline price.

2. Ranking criteria

Service rankings weigh four factors, in order:

1. Price transparency. The number you see should be the number you pay, without a second checkout step.
2. Registered-agent privacy. Whether the service sells or markets against your agent data.
3. Support quality. Response time and whether a human answers the first message.
4. Absence of dark-pattern upsells. Pre-checked boxes, fake urgency, forced “premium” trials.

Scores are integers, 0–100, with the factor weights published next to each service's detail row.

3. AI-assisted drafting

Articles flagged Agent-drafted, human-edited are generated by a workflow that queues research, writes a draft, produces a hero image, and files the draft for human review. The model ID and the prompt hash are persisted with every article row. The agent never publishes on its own; every draft lands in status = 'review' until an editor approves it.

4. Freshness

Every published article carries an “Updated” date. A cron sweep re-queues any article whose freshness is older than sixty days, so nothing is allowed to drift.

5. Corrections

If we got something wrong, send the correction through our contact page. We annotate material changes at the bottom of the article with the date and a short note.