From the Ground Up: The Free Business Toolkit Nobody Else Will Build

We spent a week going through every major business-formation site — Tailor Brands, ZenBusiness, LegalZoom, Bizee, Northwest, the whole lineup. Here is the pattern:

• The name check is bait. Most of them only let you search a business name inside a paid checkout flow. The free checkers (Namechk and friends) do not check state LLC registries or trademarks, and they leave you hanging with no next step.
• The forms are paywalled. An operating agreement — a document every LLC should have — costs $29 as an add-on here, $99 there, or sits behind a $249–$299/year plan somewhere else.
• The checkout is a minefield. Pre-selected free trials, auto-renewing compliance plans at $199/year, registered agent renewals at $249/year, signups that require a sales call.

So here is the bet behind this blog and this site: the honest, free version wins. Free name check across domains, social handles, all 50 states, and trademarks — no signup. Free forms library with plain-English explanations. No pre-selected anything, no sales calls, no gotchas.

How does that make money? The same way this whole site works: when you do decide to form the LLC or grab the domain, some of those links pay us a commission. It costs you nothing extra. That is the entire business model, stated plainly, because the industry we are competing with would never state theirs.

This blog is the build log. What is hot, what is not, what things actually cost, what the fine print says — documented live, from the ground up.