Starting a company costs a few thousand dollars, not nothing
- Nothing
- A few thousand dollars
- At least $9,100
The answer is 2, a few thousand dollars.
People often say “you can start a corporation for nothing these days!” but that claim conveniently ignores administrative fees. Document preparation plus registration and license tax alone should run you upward of $1,800.
I suspect the logic behind this is that if starting a company were truly free, people would spin them up on a whim without a shred of resolve, and nobody wants that.
As an aside, this figure varies by country. In Germany it apparently runs to something like 25,000 euros. That’s steep.
If you can afford to put up capital at the level of the $9,100 mentioned in point 3, doing so brings real advantages. But you don’t need to decide on that at founding — it’s fine to think it over later.
So the amount you actually need to get a company off the ground is a few thousand dollars. Something like $1,800 to $2,700 is a reasonable figure to cite.
A godo kaisha (LLC-type entity) can be set up more cheaply than a kabushiki kaisha (stock corporation), but the two differ in various respects, so study those differences properly on your own.
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/07/548/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.