Closing a Delaware C-Corp myself (and saving thousands)
A DIY guide to dissolving a US company without paying a service
Opening a company in the US is relatively easy and quick. You use Stripe Atlas and all goes smoothly. However, closing the corp is a little bit more difficult. In 2023 I participated in a hackathon in the AngelList office in San Francisco and won a hackathon prize, which was a credit for making a Stripe Atlas company for free. Back in the day, one of the Atlas perks was that you got $5,000 in OpenAI credits when incorporating. I needed credits at this time and went ahead with the company creation. It turned out to be handy because later I needed an entity for my business anyway. However, now I don't need this company anymore and I don't want to deal with the yearly federal tax I have to file.
For closing down your entity, Atlas provides you with two providers: SimpleClosure and LegalInc. I had a call with SimpleClosure and I think they provide a good service and seemed to be competent. LegalInc is more straightforward in the sense that you just have to wire money and don’t have to hop on a call first, but they provide less service as well.
The Delaware dissolution document generation and filing was priced at around $800 for me with LegalInc. Doing it myself took just a couple of hours more of research and then sending the documents manually via the UPS post office.
The first step in my DIY company dissolving mission was to figure out if my company was already voided and on which date. A company gets voided if you miss paying your franchise tax. Checking the status can be done here, however there is a caveat: they only show you basic information and don't directly tell you if your company was already voided or not. To check if your company is voided, you need to pay an extra $10 to receive this information. This is the PDF I got after paying the $10, and as you can see my company has been voided since 2025:
So my official company dissolution date was 3/1/2025. This is the date I was able to use in my 966 filing as well as in my EIN closing letter. The 966 filing I filled out with Claude Code, as well as the generation of the EIN closing letter. The closing letter you have to write yourself, as there is no official form for it like the 966. I still had to file yearly federal tax (1120 forms). I used Claude Code as well here for writing my info into the PDF. Sometimes I needed to prompt Claude Code several times to get it right (writing into complex PDF structures is still a challenge for AI). Once everything was filed, I just had to go to the post office and send all the documents (it was handy that I was in SF during that time since international shipping is more complex). I had two different envelopes because the EIN closure letter goes to a different address than the tax filings and the 966. Here is the receipt I got from the post office after sending the documents.
The sole reason why I did all of that is because I was the director of the company, and as such the IRS (short for Internal Revenue Service) can come after me personally for unfiled returns of my federal tax, which can be up to $25,000 per return. By filing the 966 and sending the closure letter, you officially notify the IRS that the company is done, and the EIN closure letter closes the IRS account so they stop expecting filings. The company will still exist forever and is not going to be deleted from the database, and technically it will collect franchise tax debt infinitely, but nobody will ever collect it since the company doesn't have any assets and the debt doesn't follow me personally.
This ended the chapter of a company I incorporated in 2023, saving thousands of dollars by doing it myself instead of using other services. If I want to create a new company, I can just make a new incorporation with Stripe Atlas.