$149 a Quarter Is Not $149 a Year

Disclosure, since credibility is the whole currency on a page like this. Maryland Registered Agent.co competes directly with Swyft Filings and earns $99 a year from every switch. Their published rate is reproduced below exactly as they state it.

What Swyft Does Right

The billing cadence is disclosed. Swyft Filings tells you it charges $149 per quarter, and you can read that before buying anything. We have nothing to say about how well the company handles documents, because we have no evidence either way, and making some up would be worse than staying quiet.

Four Charges, One Year

$149 a quarter is $596 a year, near enough. That is the heaviest annual figure among the services we price, and when we checked pricing in July 2026 there was no separate first-year discount attached to blunt it.

Quarterly billing does something specific to perception. The full year total never shows up on a single screen. $149 reads like a mid-range agent fee right up until you multiply, and the multiplying has been left to you. That is the objection here, and it is about presentation rather than honesty.

Nearly five hundred dollars a year of daylight. Put another way, that agent bill runs close to double what Maryland charges for its own annual report, and the Maryland report is already one of the priciest yearly filings in the country at $300.

Maryland Bills Once, and So Do We

There is a certain symmetry worth pointing out. This state runs on one big annual date. The Form 1 window opens January 1, the report is due April 15, the fee is a flat $300, and an extra 60 days running to June 15 is yours for the asking online, at no charge. One filing, one deadline, one fee. Your agent invoice can work the same way.

Ours does. $99 once a year, renewing at $99. That covers our Maryland street address on the public record, anything a process server delivers imaged the same business day, email alerts, the portal, and a reminder ahead of that April date. There is one optional charge, $15 per item, if you also want everyday business mail scanned, and we would rather it appear on this page than in a footnote somewhere.

The cheapest badge is not ours to wear. BetterLegal publishes $90 annually. What we will defend is that $99 sits among the lower published Maryland rates, arrives once, and does not need a calculator.

Where Swyft Filings Comes Off: SDAT's Charter Division

Maryland handles this with one document. Its full name is Resolution to Change Principal Office or Resident Agent, and it belongs at SDAT's Charter Division with $25 attached. There is no form number to look up, because the agency does not use them on charter documents. Online filing runs through Maryland Business Express, and card payments there carry a 3 percent service charge.

The sequencing rule is simple and worth following exactly. The resolution names your incoming agent, which means the new agent has to exist before the form does. Sign up, file, confirm the change on your entity record, and only then stop the Swyft billing. Reverse those and your record shows an empty agent line for however long processing takes.

One practical advantage of a quarterly plan: whenever you decide, the next billing date is at most about twelve weeks out, so there is not much prepaid time to write off. Our Maryland change of agent page takes it from there.

While You Are Already in the Paperwork

If you are still at the formation stage, section 4A-204 sets out what your Articles of Organization have to contain, and the agent's name plus a Maryland address are on that list from day one. Filing the articles costs $100 at SDAT. Getting the agent choice right at formation saves you the $25 correction later on.

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Nine Maryland services, published prices only, sit in our agent comparison.