I get why your staff would be pissed because dealing with a crappy printer/scanner is the bane of a lot of office workers' existence... but they must have been able to find a better vendor or something off the shelf which supported the features they needed right? What special feature could they possibly offer to make them brave enough to put all those terms in their contract?

They count on potential customers not reading the contracts, or being able to do math or research themselves.

Typical customers for these types of scams are small offices with no technical person in the loop.

Another example is the predatory, abusive contracts sold for merchant card processing.

Whereas our local bank will do it for $10 a month, interchange plus 0.15%, no contract. Versus fees of 3%, 3 year contract.

I’m also on a nonprofit board. They have an independent LLC and an independent nonprofit which signs contracts for various services like that, and then contracts with the “real” nonprofit to actually use the services. Was advised to set it up this way by an experienced nonprofit consultant.

We had to shred a bad contract (oddly enough, also for a printer / copier) and simply abandoned the LLC and declared it defunct. The service provider never has even showed up to pick up the printer. It was a pay per page contract where they unilaterally raised the price about 200% for no reason.

We also abandoned a water cooler and water cooler service after the vendor simply refused to answer our requests to end the service. (It’s $20 a month. There was no long term contract signed.) Apparently nonprofits are a target for this sort of thing, so we now don’t even mention we are a nonprofit and handle business relationships via the LLC.

It’s absurd things have become this way.

How are you setting up LLCs nowadays? I set one up through legalzoom and get charged an increasing amount each year (it increased $100) this year and I can't cancel / dissolve the charges via the UI. Even though I signed up online, I have to contact the state to dissolve the LLC then show legalzoom proof in order to cancel their yearly fee. Its pretty crazy.

Are there other better vendors for this kind of work out there?

Why do you need a "vendor" at all? Do the paperwork yourself and pay the $100 fee (or whatever it is in your chosen state), and Bob's yer uncle. At worst add in a one-time cost of $40 or so to buy a book like Nolo's LLC Handbook[1].

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Nolos-LLC-Handbook-Agreements-Instruc...

Because you don't want to be your own registered agent.

This is out of date advice, primarily given by registered agents who often aren't actual attorneys.

Not everyone wants to have their location publicly available for the world to see. If you can be served a lawsuit, people can "serve" you a bunch of other things too.

Fair enough. For my money, I wouldn't pay somebody else to do that, but I can see the appeal for some folks.

You might want to use a registered agent rather than blasting someone's home address into all kinds of public records, or using an attorney who starts the billing clock to receive spam. And when you go for the more reasonably priced registered agents, it feels like a ticking clock until they start to enshittify.

I form them myself, which takes about 5 minutes on the Secretary of State's website. The only fee to the state is a one time formation fee. This is true in a variety of states.

I got this advice to do so from (a) the aforementioned nonprofit consultant and (b) an actual attorney, who does serve as a registered agent, for no fee. He is glad to do so since in the very rare event of a lawsuit, he'll be the one representing us. However, you could also just be your own registered agent if you have an office where people regularly work.

Note that I am not going out of my way to conceal the identity of the nonprofit board members / members of the LLC.