Lots of mistakes, expensive, and too big to care
Right off the bat, their salesman had made me believe the first month would be free, but they still charged me. Eventually, they did rectify this, but only after I brought it up and they were reluctant to do it.
During onboarding, I was assigned my advocate and she went on maternity leave four days after I joined. It is fine to provide leave for their employees, but you would expect the forethought not to be assigned to someone they know is about to leave and force your new client to re-explain everything to their new advocate. They only reassigned me after I asked where my main contact has disappeared to.
Additionally, many, many mistakes were made on my compliance documents over the year that I used them. After their mistakes the first time using them to update my ADV, I spoon-fed my requests to them (commenting exact words to be added/removed in exact places in the documents), essentially doing their job for them, and they still made so many mistakes. It is actually amazing how simple the mistakes they made were. They draft legal and compliance documents for a living but don't seem to reread for spelling errors or anything. The third update was even more painful. Going back and forth trying to fix basic problems that I explained in the first email and was still wrong on the 10th. It was like pulling teeth. Again, I spoon-fed exactly what I wanted to them to try to avoid mistakes or wasted time, but they still seemed to mess it up.
I paid $275/mo for the service. It is expensive already, it is a premium service. Throughout the year I kept getting reached out to or notified on their platform that they had added new features and tried to upsell me on them. It was a constant reminder of my missing features and a culture of profit over experience. These new feature updates seemed useful, but were paywalled behind hundreds of dollars a month. These were core features for advisors that should not be paywalled, they should simply be an added feature. There are comparable providers that offer more services at lower prices than RIA in a Box.
When it was time to renew for another year I got reached out to with a warning that my bill would be increasing by 10%, but that they were being extremely generous offering an only 6-7% increase if I signed up for a 3 year term or only up 4-5% increase if I signed up for a 5 year term. Thanks for offering to lock me in and increase prices without providing any new features.
Finally, after 11 months when I switch to a new compliance consultant, they still charged me for the last month with no work required on their end because it was an annual contract. It is their legal right to do so, but it isn't how they should treat their customers. Treating customers fairly should be cultural in a company. In this company, it seems that profits are more important than customers.
I hope this review has been helpful and informs you to look for another compliance consultant for your RIA business. Check out Kitces's AdvisorTech Directory on the Kitces website to see other industry standard compliance options and alternatives to RIA in a Box.