The Honest Limits of "No KYC Under $1,000"

One of our recurring brand promises is "Tier 0 KYC for orders under $1,000: email, country, intent, sanctions screen, that's it." The promise is real. But the honest accounting has nuance, and customers who buy on the strength of the Tier 0 promise without reading the AML Policy sometimes feel surprised at the registered agent step. This post lays out what Tier 0 actually means, what it does not mean, and why the boundary is where it is.

What Tier 0 actually means

When you order a Tier 0 SKU, a Wyoming LLC, a New Mexico LLC, an EIN attach, a Registered Agent renewal, an apostille bundle, OffshoreGuy collects from you exactly four things at the platform level: your email address, your country of residence, a free-text intended-use statement, and your name as it will appear on the formation documents. We then run that against three sanctions lists: OFAC SDN (US), EU consolidated sanctions, and UN sanctions through our compliance-screening provider. If you come back clean, we proceed with the order without asking you to upload a passport, a utility bill, or any document.

That is materially less collection than the major US-LLC formation incumbents, which start their KYC at the Tier 1 equivalent (passport upload through a third-party KYC vendor). Our Tier 0 collection is a real, deliberate choice. We believe it is appropriate for orders under $1,000 because the risk-weighted cost of full KYC at that price tier is wrong for the operator.

What Tier 0 does not mean

It does not mean "anonymous." Your name is on the formation document, your email is in our database, and your country of residence is logged for sanctions purposes. Federal CTA / Beneficial Ownership Information reporting to FinCEN applies to every US LLC regardless of our platform-level KYC. Your name ends up in the FinCEN BOI register at the federal level even though Wyoming itself does not publish it.

It does not mean "no registered agent KYC." This is the part that surprises people. Your registered agent in Wyoming is a regulated US business with its own Bank Secrecy Act obligations and runs their own beneficial-owner identification on every formation they handle. The same is true of our New Mexico registered agent, our Seychelles provider, our Nevis provider, and the Marshall Islands DAO LLC agent. Every offshore registered agent in our network is a regulated trust-and-corporate-service provider and is statutorily required to identify the beneficial owner under their local AML law.

We disclose this on every product page. We disclose it on the jurisdiction long-form pages. We disclose it in the AML Policy. But the gap between "OffshoreGuy collects four things" and "your registered agent collects substantially more" is real and we want to be plain about it.

This is not a no-KYC platform. It is a tier-based platform with an honest disclosure of what each tier collects.

Why the boundary is at $1,000

The choice of $1,000 as the Tier 0 ceiling is a deliberate risk-weighted line. Below $1,000, the absolute exposure on any single order is low enough that the additional KYC cost (the per-applicant fee charged by our KYC partner, the operator's time to gather documents, the friction it adds to checkout) exceeds the AML risk-reduction value. Above $1,000, that calculation reverses. The order value justifies the cost of Tier 1 verification and the regulatory exposure of bypassing it becomes meaningful.

Below the $1,000 line, we rely on (a) the sanctions screen catching the small subset of customers who are on a list, (b) the registered agent's own KYC catching anything we missed at the platform level, and (c) the fact that even at Tier 0 we know the name and country of every customer.

This is not a "no-KYC" platform. It is a tier-based platform with an honest disclosure of what each tier collects.

What the registered agent specifically collects

Here is what we have observed our registered agents requiring at the formation step, by jurisdiction. We describe the diligence pattern, not the counterparty identity.

Wyoming: name, address, role (organizer / member), email. The registered agent does not request ID copies for standard formations and runs a basic OFAC screen of their own.

New Mexico: similar to Wyoming. Name, address, organizer info. Sometimes a brief description of the business purpose. No ID copies typically.

Seychelles: notarized copy of passport, recent utility bill (within 90 days), beneficial-owner declaration, source-of-funds attestation. This is materially more than what we collect at Tier 0. Customers ordering a Seychelles IBC therefore go through our Tier 1 flow at our layer too, because anything less would mean we couldn't supply the registered agent with what they require.

Nevis: same as Seychelles, plus often a reference letter from a bank or attorney. This is why Nevis is a Tier 1 SKU on our platform.

Marshall Islands DAO LLC: notarized passport, address proof, source-of-funds, beneficial-owner declaration, smart-contract disclosure forms. Tier 1 KYC on our platform, sometimes additional for higher-treasury DAOs.

UK: PSC (Person with Significant Control) disclosure is required by Companies House and is published publicly. UK is the one jurisdiction where you cannot maintain platform-level anonymity even at Tier 0 because the public disclosure is statutory.

What this means for you

If you want a genuinely lower-KYC formation, meaning both our platform layer and the registered agent layer ask less, Wyoming and New Mexico are the cleanest US options. Both have registered agents whose KYC is light (compared to offshore agents) and both let us run Tier 0 at our layer.

If you want an offshore IBC, plan to provide Tier 1 documentation at minimum. The registered agent will require it regardless of what we collect at the platform layer.

If you want true anonymity, no platform on Earth can offer it for a legal entity. CTA / BOI applies to US entities. Local UBO requirements apply to offshore entities. The era of fully-anonymous beach-shell IBC is over and has been for several years.

The honest pitch

We are the lowest-friction formation platform for sub-$1,000 US LLC formations because we genuinely collect less than competitors. We are not a privacy magic wand. The structures themselves provide privacy at the public-records layer (Wyoming, NM, Seychelles, Nevis all hide member names from the public). The platform layer offers reduced collection at our tier. The registered agent layer collects what their local regulator requires. All three layers are transparent on every page where we describe a product.

Read the AML Policy before you order. We mean it.