...and there are plenty of shared offices and pseudo-offices in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. Unexpected != shady. I started a Wyoming "close corpo

...and there are plenty of shared offices and pseudo-offices in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. Unexpected != shady. I started a Wyoming "close corporation" (unique to WY and awesome for small businesses) last spring, and used FreeRegisteredAgent.com aka Incorp.com as my registered agent. They do the first year free, $99/yr after that. They weren't the fastest responders, but when I dissolved the company a year later they did get back to me, and it didn't prove to be a scam. I don't have my numbers handy, but in the end I calculated that it would cost something like $1,000 per year to even begin to legitimize a presence in Wyoming. You'd need a mail forwarding service in the state, of which there are few. You'd also almost certainly want a state driver's license, and some of the mail forwarding and registered agent companies will let you use their address for that! Incidentally, I went with Wyoming because NV and DE have both started charging rather steep annual licensing fees. (the reason for all this, by the way, is because my plan was to live abroad and do some coding on the side, which puts me in a strange tax situation, and costs had to be extremely low.)