The walkthrough we wish we’d had.

Most SLPs graduate trained to treat patients, not to form LLCs, enroll with insurance panels, or figure out which federal ID number belongs on which form. When a licensed clinician decides to go solo, the first few months aren't clinical. They're paperwork.

And the internet is full of generic "how to start an LLC" posts that don't know the difference between a solo Speech-Language Pathologist and a five-person orthopedic group. We watched a practicing SLP go through all of it the hard way, and decided the walkthrough deserved to exist.

Every state-specific fact in Fledge was sourced firsthand from the state's own agency. Not summarized from a blog. Not generated by an LLM. If a number is stale we want to know. The contact link in the footer goes to a real person, not a ticket queue.

We're also opinionated. Most guides list five options for every decision and leave you to pick. Fledge tells you which one the solo SLPs actually pick, and why. The right default beats ten wrong ones.

Fledge is co-founded by a practicing Speech-Language Pathologist and a software engineer. The clinician is in the clinic every week, running the same playbook Fledge walks everyone else through. The engineer built the walkthrough you're reading.

That's the reason the guidance sounds specific instead of generic: someone on the team is still doing this work. It's also why we're Maryland-only right now. She practices there, and we'd rather verify one state firsthand than bullet-point fifty from a distance.

The free setup walkthrough is live for Maryland. The first three phases are production-ready: state and license confirmation, business formation, and provider identifiers. The phases after that (picking payer panels, credentialing applications, clinical operations) are on deck.

A paid billing service is coming later. We haven't turned it on yet. When we do, it will be per-claim pricing paid out of what you collect. The setup walkthrough itself will stay free, indefinitely.