Methodology: scoring, verification and updates

Independence and conflicts of interest

Start in BG sells no company-formation, accounting or advisory service, and takes no commission, referral fee or listing fee from any provider compared here. Nothing on this page can be bought. If sponsored placements are introduced later they will sit outside the ranked table, under their own heading, labelled as advertising, and they will not affect any score.

One conflict has to be declared by name. Until August 2026 Start in BG had a commercial partnership with SmartTaxBG, which executed the formations Start in BG then sold. That partnership has ended, and with it every trace of preferred treatment: there is no partner badge, no preferred-provider link and no lead routing anywhere on this site. SmartTaxBG is compared under the same methodology as every other provider, and its score was not moved in either direction because the relationship ended.

What is different about that row is its evidence, and the comparison marks it “Attested” so nobody has to take our word for the difference. The other 36 rows were built by reading each provider's own public pages. This one was verified directly by Start in BG's founder during the partnership — first-hand knowledge of a firm he worked with, which is better evidence of what a provider actually does than a marketing page is, but which is not evidence of what it publishes. These scores measure published evidence, accessibility and transparency, so a more complete record here does not by itself mean SmartTaxBG is more transparent than providers assessed only on their websites. We have not adjusted the number to compensate: moving a score to correct for how it was sourced would be exactly the editorial thumb on the scale this page exists to rule out. We label it instead, and leave the reader to weigh it.

Two fields on that row stand on public evidence of their own: the €400 fee excluding VAT, confirmed on the provider's own page, and the registered legal entity (Smart Tax Consulting Ltd, EIK 205594021), confirmed against the Bulgarian Commercial Register. No row in this dataset cites startinbg.com as a source; a test enforces it.

Verification standard

1. Official provider websites are the primary source for every field.
2. Third-party sources are used only to corroborate identity, credentials and reviews — never to fill in prices or service claims.
3. Each provider record stores its source URLs and its verification date.
4. Fields that are not published anywhere are stored as “not disclosed”; ambiguous statements as “unclear”. These are distinct states from “no” and are displayed as such — nothing is invented or silently inferred.
5. Provider statements are labelled as claims unless independently verified.
6. A row built on evidence other than the provider's own published pages is marked “Attested” in the comparison, states its basis on its own page, and — since 2026-08-24 — publishes no Transparency and evidence score at all, for the same reason a pending row does not: that score specifically measures what a provider's own published pages establish, and this evidence class is not that. One row carries this today — see the conflicts section above.
7. A row whose fields have not been established at all is marked “pending re-verification” and publishes no Transparency and evidence score either. Neither exemption is a low score: “publishes little”, “was never checked” and “was checked by a different method” are three different findings, and only the first is a score. An exempt row sorts outside the ranking rather than at the bottom of it. No row is pending re-verification at present.
8. A provider's legal identity is checked against its own published pages only — cross-checking that identity against a company register is a separate, additional step, and it has not been possible for every row. This check, when performed, is never folded into the Transparency and evidence score above: it answers a different question (“does this legal entity exist as claimed?”, not “what does the provider publish?”) and renders as its own status per provider. Each provider page states plainly which of five things happened for that row (“Bulgarian Commercial Register check”): a specific Bulgarian legal entity was independently confirmed in the Commercial Register (“verified”, with its EIK); the provider operates through an entity confirmed in a different country's register instead (“not a Bulgarian entity”); the provider is a Bulgarian attorney or law partnership independently confirmed in the Bar Register instead — a different, non-commercial register that never carries an EIK (“verified as a Bulgarian attorney/law firm”); a check was attempted but no single candidate could be confirmed (“inconclusive” — this states nothing as fact); or no check was attempted (“not performed”). An AI-assisted first pass proposed a registration for every compared provider; roughly half of the Bulgarian EIKs it proposed could not be independently corroborated (one was contradicted by a real record under a different EIK), and a second re-check of that pass's own “inconclusive” findings confirmed several of them genuinely are real Bulgarian lawyers, just registered with the Bar rather than the Commercial Register. Only what an independent check actually confirmed is ever shown as anything other than “inconclusive” or “not performed” — see data/comparison/CHANGELOG.md's 2026-08-16 entries for the full record of what was and was not corroborated, including one case where the search tool used for the re-check generated a confident-sounding summary asserting a specific number that did not actually appear anywhere in its own cited results — a reminder that a summary is not a source.
9. Estimated figures (like first-year cost estimates) are always shown together with their stored assumptions.

Update process

The dataset is a versioned JSON file maintained in the site's repository. Data is never scraped or overwritten at runtime: every change is proposed, validated by an automated schema and score check (including duplicate-provider and duplicate-domain warnings), recorded in an editorial changelog and reviewed before it is committed. Each record shows its own last verified date; once a record is older than 90 days it carries an “Update recommended” badge until it is re-verified.

What the scores are not

Scores measure published evidence, accessibility and transparency; they do not certify legal quality or guarantee service outcomes. The comparison never declares an automatic winner: the side-by-side view highlights differences and keeps every provider's caveat and sources visible so you can weigh them for your own case.

Disclaimer

This comparison is for general informational purposes only and is not legal, tax, accounting, banking or immigration advice. Prices, packages and services change frequently; every figure is a snapshot as of its last-verified date and must be confirmed directly with each provider. Inclusion does not represent endorsement, a high Transparency and evidence score is not a quality judgment or a guarantee of outcome, and provider statements are claims unless independently verified. Providers are shown alphabetically by default, not by score — a ranking is one click away via the 'Transparency score' column header or the filters, not the page's opening view. Verification here means checking a provider's own published pages — it does not include a check against a company register unless a row's 'Bulgarian Commercial Register check' field says otherwise; that check is independent of the Transparency and evidence score and is never folded into it. That field has five states: 'verified' (a specific Bulgarian legal entity was independently confirmed, with its EIK), 'not a Bulgarian entity' (the provider operates through an entity registered in a different country, independently confirmed there), 'verified as a Bulgarian attorney/law firm' (a Bulgarian lawyer or law partnership independently confirmed in the Bar Register — a different, non-commercial register that never carries an EIK), 'inconclusive' (a check was attempted but no single candidate could be confirmed — this states nothing as fact) and 'not performed'. Start in BG sells no company-formation, accounting or advisory services and takes no commission, referral fee or listing fee from any provider listed here. Nothing in this comparison can be bought. One conflict has to be declared by name: until August 2026 Start in BG had a commercial partnership with SmartTaxBG, one of the compared providers, and that partnership has ended. SmartTaxBG's row is marked 'Attested', which is a statement about evidence rather than about quality: it was verified directly by Start in BG's founder during that partnership rather than read off the provider's public pages the way the other 36 rows were. First-hand knowledge of a firm makes a record more complete than a marketing page does, but the Transparency and evidence score specifically measures published evidence and transparency — so, since 2026-08-24, this row publishes no score and appears in no ranking at all, rather than a number that would confuse a fuller record with a more transparent provider. Two of its fields still stand on public evidence of their own: the €400 fee excluding VAT, confirmed on the provider's own page, and the registered legal entity (Smart Tax Consulting Ltd, EIK 205594021), confirmed against the Bulgarian Commercial Register. This change was made for that reason alone, not because of the relationship, and no row cites startinbg.com as evidence.