From the simplest business — a single-member LLC that never took on outside money — to the most complex, multi-state, investor-backed enterprise, Starcycle can close it. Your path depends on how complicated your case is, not how big your company got.
Answer a short set of mostly yes/no questions. If your case is straightforward, you get a quote and can move straight to closing it out — no calls, no back-and-forth.
Multiple states, investors, a cap table, outstanding contracts — anything with more moving parts gets a dashboard and a dedicated person on our team working on it with you: a tailored action plan, key-date tracking, contract and subscription cancellation before they renew on you, document management, and the state filings themselves.
Starcycle handles the administrative paperwork — not legal or tax advice. For anything that needs a lawyer's or accountant's judgment, we work through partner CPA and legal relationships, or yours.
Every shutdown — simple or complex — covers the same ground: filings, deadlines, contracts, records. For straightforward cases, this moves automatically as part of your quote. For complex cases, a person on our team handles it with you directly.
No two shutdowns look the same. A single-member LLC that never took outside money doesn't file the same paperwork as a Delaware C-corp winding up — Form 966, for instance, only applies to C-Corps. We ask mostly yes/no questions to build your specific plan, not a blank form you have to fill in from scratch.
Every deadline in one place — franchise tax due dates, filing windows, contract renewal dates. We also run an automatic good-standing check across all 50 states, so a registration you forgot about in a state you barely operated in doesn't surface as a surprise a year later.
We go through what you're paying for and cancel it on a timeline that avoids early-termination fees and auto-renewals, instead of you discovering a charge three months after you thought you were done.
We keep every filing, contract, and closure document organized and accessible — so if a question comes up in a year (an old vendor, a tax authority, a founder reference check), you're not digging through a shut-down inbox to find it.
We file the paperwork — articles of dissolution, certificates of cancellation, final tax returns, EIN cancellation — correctly the first time, in every state you're registered in, not just the one you incorporated in.
A short intake, mostly yes/no questions — entity type, states you're registered in, what's still running (contracts, payroll, a lease).
Simple case: get your quote and go. Complex case: we build your specific, dated action plan and quote it upfront.
White-glove cases. Every letter and filing is drafted first, then reviewed and approved by a person on our team before anything gets sent — not an unreviewed AI document landing in a state office's inbox.
No lingering franchise tax, no orphaned subscription still charging your card six months later.
Winding down doesn't mean walking away from everything you built. Some of what's left — unused equipment, software credits, intellectual property, even the operational history of the business itself — still has value if someone knows where to look and who to call. We've built specialized capabilities for identifying and recovering that value as part of a shutdown, backed by a network of partners who know how to place it. It's not a separate process bolted onto your closure — it happens alongside the filings, the cancellations, and everything else, so you leave with more than just a closed entity.
We were founders first. Before Starcycle existed, we closed our own companies — and found out the hard way that nobody had built a good way to do it. No single point of contact, just an open-ended legal bill or a dozen browser tabs open to different state websites. So we built the thing we wished we'd had: a team that combines that founder experience with the professional expertise to do the filings right, without the hourly clock or the impersonal hand-off. Some shutdown services only take venture-backed companies. We take any founder closing a company, backed or not.
“Any founder who has been through this process can attest that it's not a fun experience, but Starcycle made it super easy and relieved our stress that had been building up.”
EdTech Founder
“Working with Starcycle saved me over $6,000 in legal fees and countless hours of effort. Their team clarified complex dissolution steps, provided clear timelines, and offered invaluable guidance for closing my Delaware corporation smoothly.”
Climate Tech Founder
You can — most of what we do is technically public information on state websites. What you're paying for is not missing anything: the deadline that's easy to miss, the multi-state registration you forgot about, the auto-renewing contract nobody flagged. That's usually where the real cost of “DIY” shows up, months later. State laws are also constantly changing and the compliance burden shifting. What was up-to-date last month may be wrong this month.
No, we only help US companies shutdown at this time.
Yes, whatever your business structure and dynamics Starcycle can help you work through it. We've helped companies shut down in a variety of different situations and have seen it all!
Yes. If your shutdown is straightforward, our automated path gets you a quote right away and skips the back-and-forth entirely.
It depends on your entity type, how many states you're registered in, and which path you're on. You'll get a real timeline as part of your plan — not a vague “a few weeks.” If you try to do this yourself it takes months and tons of back and forth; we have done so many of these we have built systems around the process and streamlined the entire workflow to be as efficient as possible.
We handle that too. Connect your bank account and we can send final distributions back to investors directly, alongside the state paperwork — not a separate process you have to coordinate yourself.
No. We handle the administrative side — filings, cancellations, documentation. For legal or tax judgment calls specific to your situation, we work through partner CPA and legal relationships, or yours.
No. Drafts get generated fast, but nothing goes out — no letter, no filing — until a person on our team has reviewed and approved it. The speed is automated; the accountability isn't.
Shutting down your business is tough, but you’re not alone.
We’re here to help.
Starcycle