Setting up a California LLC as a solo dev

Before AnimeRecap was a live site, it was a question: do I run this under my personal name, or under a company? The case for a company, once you have more than a toy project, is three things:

• Liability. If something you ship somehow hurts somebody’s business, you’d rather they sue the LLC than sue you personally. The LLC’s assets are on the line; yours aren’t (in the ideal case, with real-world caveats).
• Signal. Contracts, partnerships, and ads networks treat an LLC as a thing to deal with more readily than a personal brand.
• Tax and accounting. Income and expenses are tidier when they’re separate from your personal finances. You keep receipts anyway; keeping them for the LLC makes the exercise useful at year-end.

This isn’t legal advice and I’m not a lawyer. It’s a description of what I actually did, in California, in 2026, to go from “this side project is getting real” to “I have a company and I know what forms it has to file.”

What a California LLC actually costs

The direct costs, as of 2026:

• $70 filing fee for Articles of Organization (Form LLC-1) with the California Secretary of State.
• $800 annual franchise tax to the Franchise Tax Board. This is the headline number everyone talks about. Every California LLC owes it, every year, whether or not you made any money. There’s a first-year waiver that existed historically but was sunsetted — check current rules.
• $20 biennial Statement of Information (Form LLC-12), due within 90 days of forming and then every other year.
• $0–$0 for the EIN from the IRS. Don’t pay a third party for this; it’s free direct from the IRS website and takes 10 minutes.

Indirect costs worth budgeting:

• Registered agent service, if you don’t want to be your own. Price range is $49–$300/year depending on provider. More on this in a moment.
• Business bank account — most options are $0/month if you stay under a transaction threshold. Some charge $15-25/month.
• Accounting software — roughly $20-30/month for something like Wave, FreshBooks, or a similar solo-friendly tool. Skipping this is a false economy once you have receipts to track.

So call it ~$900 in the first year for a bare-bones, no-frills setup. The $800 franchise tax dominates.

Step 1: Pick a name and verify it’s available

California’s Secretary of State has a business search tool. Search for your intended name. What you’re looking for:

• No exact match exists.
• No “close enough” match that a human official might flag. California is stricter than most states about this.
• The name ends with an LLC-signaling suffix: “LLC,” “L.L.C.,” “Limited Liability Company,” etc. They all count; pick one and stick with it.

While you’re at it, check that the matching domain name is available. You’d be surprised how many people lock in a business name before realizing the .com is taken.

If you want to reserve the name before filing the rest, there’s a $10 Name Reservation Request (Form NC-1) that holds it for 60 days. Most solo devs skip this and just file Articles of Organization directly.

Step 2: Registered agent

California requires every LLC to have a registered agent — a person or company with a California street address who can receive legal documents on the LLC’s behalf during business hours.

Three options:

• Be your own registered agent. Free. Uses your home address as the public record. Means every process server and junk-mail generator in California has your home address for the life of the LLC. Fine for a one-person side project that doesn’t want to pay for a service.
• Pay a registered agent service. $49–$300/year. They use their address, forward anything legitimate to you. Privacy and out-of-town resilience. Worth it if your address is ever going to change, or if you don’t want “court serves you at your apartment” to be a possible outcome.
• Use a lawyer as registered agent. More expensive, but if you already have a business lawyer, often included in a service package.

I went with a commercial registered agent. The $100/year is worth not having my home address on the California business search tool for the rest of time.

Step 3: File Articles of Organization

California’s bizfile online portal lets you submit Form LLC-1 electronically, which is meaningfully faster than mailing paper. The form asks for:

• LLC name.
• Business purpose. California allows a generic “any lawful purpose” clause; use it unless you have a specific reason to narrow.
• Initial street address of the LLC’s designated office.
• Mailing address if different.
• Registered agent’s name and California address.
• Manager or member-managed structure. For a single-member LLC, member-managed is standard.
• Your signature as the organizer.

Pay the $70 fee. Expect to get an LLC-1 confirmation and a 12-digit entity number back, usually within a week. (If you pay for expedited processing, faster. I didn’t; it took 4 business days.)

You now have an LLC. Congratulations; the work is mostly just starting.

Step 4: Get an EIN from the IRS

An Employer Identification Number is the federal tax ID for your business. You need it for banking, tax filings, 1099s, and most vendor onboarding. It’s free from the IRS EIN online tool.

Do this step after the LLC is officially formed (you’ll need the LLC’s legal name and state) and before you try to open a bank account. The whole process is an online form that takes about 10 minutes and issues the EIN on the spot.

Do not pay any third-party service to get you an EIN. They charge $50-200 for the thing the IRS does for free in 10 minutes. The “service” is just filling out the form for you.

Step 5: Operating Agreement

California technically doesn’t require a written operating agreement for single-member LLCs, but every piece of advice I’ve read says write one anyway. Reasons:

• Banks often ask to see it when you open an account.
• Vendors sometimes ask for it for onboarding.
• It’s the document that formalizes the separation between you-personal and you-LLC, which is the thing that keeps the liability shield intact.

A single-member operating agreement is not complicated. There are templates everywhere; pick a reputable one, fill in the blanks, sign it, keep it with your business records. You don’t file it with the state; it lives in your records.

What it covers, briefly: who the member is, how much they contributed, how distributions work, how the LLC is managed, how ownership transfers would happen, what happens on dissolution. For a single-member LLC most of these are trivial.

Step 6: Business bank account

Separate finances are the whole point. Open a dedicated business checking account in the LLC’s name. The bank will want:

• Filed Articles of Organization.
• EIN confirmation letter.
• Operating agreement.
• Your personal ID.
• In some cases, a DBA filing if you operate under a name different from the legal LLC name.

For a solo dev, most modern online business banks are fine: Mercury, Novo, Relay, and Bluevine all target this exact segment. Legacy banks work too but tend to have monthly fees and worse tooling. I use Mercury; it has an API and integrates cleanly with accounting software, and the fee structure works for low-transaction-volume business.

From this point forward: every dollar the LLC earns or spends goes through the LLC account. Every dollar. If you pay for an LLC expense with your personal card by accident, reimburse yourself from the LLC by writing a check to yourself for the exact amount. Keep the receipt. This discipline is what maintains the “LLC is a separate thing” posture that makes the liability shield real.

Step 7: Statement of Information, due within 90 days

California wants a Statement of Information within 90 days of LLC formation, and then every two years after. Form LLC-12, $20 filing fee. It’s the same questions the Articles of Organization asked — address, agent, members, manager — just confirmed and refreshed.

Set a calendar reminder for it. California does not forget. Missing the deadline triggers a $250 penalty and eventually LLC suspension. The form itself is 10 minutes.

Step 8: The $800 franchise tax

Every California LLC owes $800/year to the Franchise Tax Board. Even if you made zero revenue. Even if you’re still in year one. Even if you dissolved the LLC mid-year.

The tax is due by the 15th day of the 4th month after your LLC’s formation date (so if you formed in April, first payment is due by July 15). After the first year, it’s due by April 15 each year. You pay via Form FTB 3522.

There are also LLC fees on gross receipts above $250,000, but if you’re reading a blog post titled “Setting up a California LLC as a solo dev” you are (like me) probably not there yet.

What I file annually, ongoing

Here’s the yearly cadence, once the LLC is set up:

• $800 to FTB, due April 15.
• Federal income tax, pass-through to my personal return on Schedule C (single-member LLCs are disregarded entities for federal tax purposes unless you elect otherwise; for a side project, keep the default).
• State income tax same treatment.
• Statement of Information, every two years, $20.
• Sales tax if I ever sell a taxable product in California. For a content site with ad revenue, I don’t owe sales tax. If you sell something physical or a SaaS, the rules are different and you should ask an accountant.
• 1099s for any contractors I pay over $600/year.

Actual accounting is kept in software. Once a year, at tax time, it gets handed to an accountant. Total time I spend on LLC-related paperwork per year: maybe eight hours, most of it in February-March preparing for taxes.

Should you bother

For a side project that’s still at the “sometimes I get paid” stage, honestly, no. Sole proprietor is fine — file a Schedule C, deduct expenses, move on. The liability exposure is limited and the $800/year franchise tax is a real cost for nothing.

An LLC starts to make sense when one of these is true:

• You’re running a real business that could be sued by a real party if something went wrong.
• You want to sign contracts or run ads under an entity name.
• You’re planning to hire contractors in volume and want the entity on those 1099s.
• You’re going to accept payment from platforms (Stripe, Google AdSense, app stores) that would rather deal with an EIN than your SSN.

For me, the ads-monetization piece was the tipping point. Running an AdSense property under an LLC is cleaner than running it under my personal name, and once I was going to form an LLC for one product I might as well form it for both.

If you’re at that threshold, California LLC formation is a solid weekend of paperwork and $900 of fees. If you’re below it, don’t bother yet. You can always form one later.