We found getting a DE LLC to be pretty much trivial; on the other hand, getting a local LLC (for us: NYC) appeared a lot less trivial, and involved things like running an ad in a newspaper. I'm still not clear on what the advantage is to getting an LLC anywhere but DE. I'm sure there are venues that are cheaper, but DE is so cheap that unless you're incorporating a whole bunch of companies at once it's hard to see why it would matter.
Did you have to register as a foreign corporation in NY after you created your DE corp?
IANAL, but for North Carolina if you have an employee in the state you must register as a foreign corporation and pay whatever fees are associated with it. It also seemed like you had to do double the paperwork each year once for DE and once for NC.
There is a trick to the advertising requirement. Since advertising in NYC is so expensive, you register in Albany and then 6 months later move the registration to NYC.
I agree though that NY LLC is not the easiest process in the world, but then again neither is NY foreign corporation registration.
Does foreign corp registration (a) not apply to LLCs, (b) normally just get handled by your accountants, or (c) actually turn out to be a detail that is trivially handled in 15 minutes? Because I don't remember this being a particularly dramatic problem for us.
