Company registration

For Indian indie hackers, the entity choice is driven by two questions: do you need investor-ready structure, and what is your risk tolerance for personal liability?

Sole proprietorship:

• Zero registration cost, starts immediately with your PAN
• No annual compliance cost (just income tax and GST if applicable)
• No liability protection (personal assets at risk)
• Cannot raise institutional funding
• Best for: solo projects under Rs 20-50 lakh revenue, no team, no investor plans

LLP (Limited Liability Partnership):

• Registration cost: Rs 3,000 to 8,000 for MCA fees, plus CA fee
• Annual compliance: LLP annual return + income tax (less paperwork than Pvt Ltd)
• Limited liability protection
• Can take partners but not institutional equity funding easily
• Best for: 2+ founders, service businesses, consulting

Private Limited Company:

• Registration cost: Rs 7,000 to 15,000 MCA fees, plus CA/CS fee
• Annual compliance: ROC annual return + board meetings + statutory audit (Rs 15,000 to 40,000/year in CA fees typically)
• Full limited liability, can issue shares, investor-ready
• Best for: product companies planning to raise funding

For most indie hackers with a side project or early SaaS: start as a sole proprietor. Switch to Pvt Ltd only when an investor or co-founder asks for it. The compliance overhead of Pvt Ltd is real and not worth it pre-traction.

Below are good options to register and run your company as a separate entity. In most cases, when you are validating new stuff and don’t have many paying users, it's okay to run this without a formal company and see how this goes rather than spending a lot of time setting up these things.

Once you decide to register a company name, you can check the below links and see what works for you.

Please evaluate carefully from below before picking one.

• Striple Atlas
• FirstBase
• Doola

On a side note, Mercury is a decent option to open a US account and operate from anywhere.