October 13, 2026
If you can’t afford a lawyer yet, keep everything standard. Form a plain Delaware C corp on a startup formation platform such as Clerky or Stripe Atlas, use the free market-standard templates (like the Y Combinator SAFE) without editing them, and make sure every founder’s 83(b) election is filed within 30 days. Use AI to understand your documents, never to draft the ones you sign, and have a startup lawyer review the package before your first hire, first big customer contract or first investor.
Key takeaways
A formation platform is a reasonable choice when the facts are simple: one founder, or co-founders splitting equity on the same terms, starting fresh, forming a Delaware C corp and not yet raising money or hiring. In that situation the platform’s templates are the same kind of documents a startup lawyer would use, and they are built to comply with Delaware law and the securities rules for founder stock.
It stops being enough when something about your company isn’t standard. That includes co-founders with different vesting or a founder joining later, code or IP that was built before the company existed (especially while someone was employed elsewhere), a company that needs an LLC rather than a corporation, a founder outside the US, or an investor who is about to send you a term sheet. A platform will still generate documents in those cases. It just won’t tell you whether they are the right ones.
Both form a Delaware C corp for a one-time fee of a few hundred dollars, and both issue founder stock and help with the 83(b) election. The difference is what happens next.
Clerky is built around the whole early life of a venture-backed company. Beyond formation, it covers the post-incorporation package (bylaws, board consents, founder stock purchase agreements with vesting, IP assignments) and later documents such as SAFEs, convertible notes, offer letters, confidentiality and invention assignment agreements, and option grants. Many startup lawyers, including us, work inside Clerky with their clients.
Stripe Atlas is the fastest way to get a company formed, get an EIN and open a bank account, and it is popular with founders outside the US. It offers little after formation, so you’ll need another source for SAFEs, hiring documents and board consents. AngelList now uses Stripe Atlas for its own formation offering.
For a company on a venture path, either works for the formation itself. Clerky is the better fit if you expect to keep using a platform for the documents that come after.
| Clerky | Stripe Atlas | AI draft | Startup lawyer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | A few hundred dollars | A few hundred dollars | Free or nearly free | Flat fee or hourly |
| What you get | Formation, post-incorporation documents, later financing and hiring documents | Formation, EIN, founder stock, 83(b) help | A draft that looks right | Documents plus the judgment calls |
| Best for | A standard venture-track company that wants one place for documents | Getting formed and banked quickly | Learning what documents say | Anything non-standard, or before you raise |
The Y Combinator post-money SAFE is free and is the market standard for early rounds. Investors expect it unchanged, so use the official form and change only the blanks (investor, amount, valuation cap, discount if any). A SAFE someone has rewritten, or one an AI tool has “improved,” usually costs more to fix than it saved. See SAFE.
The NVCA model documents and the Series Seed documents are also free, but they are for priced rounds and are written for lawyers to adapt. By the time you are raising a priced round, the investor’s counsel will be involved and you’ll want your own. See Series Seed vs. NVCA Documents.
Cap table software such as Carta tracks who owns what. It isn’t a source of legal documents, but you’ll want one once you have more than founders on the cap table. See What Should We Use to Manage Our Startup Cap Table?
AI is great at understanding legal documents. Use it to learn what a document says, compare two drafts, or prepare your questions for a lawyer. But when the stakes matter, you want an experienced lawyer, not an AI draft. AI output reads like a real legal document whether or not it is correct, and nothing tells you which parts are wrong. It also doesn’t know what is market for a startup deal, what investors will push back on, or how a clause will play out years later in a financing or a sale. Your formation documents, founder stock, SAFEs and first employment documents are exactly where the stakes are high and mistakes are expensive to unwind.
These are the mistakes we see most often when founders form a company or raise money on their own, whether they used AI, a platform or a template:
Sometimes, but less often than founders expect. The cost of legal work is mostly in the judgment calls (share counts, vesting start dates, whether the stock price is still valid, how IP gets in), not in the typing. A package generated from a standard platform is quick to review. A custom or AI-drafted package often takes longer to review than it would have taken to draft from a lawyer’s own templates, because every clause has to be checked.
A sensible path for a solo founder with a plain Delaware C corp is to form on a platform, then pay a startup lawyer a flat fee to review the package and fix anything wrong before the first hire or investor. Fixing a bad formation during a financing costs far more. See How Startups Can Avoid Wasting Money on Lawyers and I Just Incorporated My Startup.
For choosing counsel, see Choosing the Best Startup Lawyer. Our flat fees are on our pricing page, and our formation package is described on Corporation Startup Package. If you’d like us to review documents you’ve already prepared, contact us.
