Twenty-one websites hold Paris’s right to sell legal notices at state-fixed prices.

Starting capital this week is €443.78 [$500], at the European Central Bank euro reference rate of 1 USD = 0.88755 EUR for 4 November 2026, that is 1 EUR = 1.1267 USD. The target, about $5,000 a month, is €4,437.75 a month or €53,253.00 a year. Evidence figures below stay in the currency their source states them in; only the derived row converts, and it shows the rate.

Three things are true of annonces judiciaires et légales at once, and holding all three in view is the whole edition. The transaction is compulsory: a company that does not publish cannot complete its formality at the greffe. The price is administered: the arrêté du 28 décembre 2025, amending the arrêté du 19 novembre 2021, fixes €199 HT for a SAS constitution, €148 for a SARL, €124 for an EURL, €399 for an SA, €153 to open a dissolution and €111 to close a liquidation, with everything outside the forfait priced per character — €0.239 in Paris, €0.189 across most of metropolitan France. And supply is rationed by an annual administrative act: only a support on the préfet’s list may take the money, and, in the ministry’s own words, « une habilitation délivrée les années précédentes ne pouvant faire l’objet d’un renouvellement automatique » [an habilitation granted in previous years cannot be renewed automatically].

The consensus reading is that this is a legacy newspaper privilege. The Paris list says otherwise. The arrêté préfectoral du 9 décembre 2025 names 29 supports habilités, of which 8 are printed publications — La Croix, Les Echos, Libération, Le Parisien, Les Affiches Parisiennes, L’Argus de l’assurance, L’Itinérant, Le Moniteur — and 21 are services de presse en ligne: lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr, bfmtv.com and latribune.fr, but also jss.fr, mesinfos.fr, memento.fr, citoyens.com, liti.fr and aucoeurduchr.fr, the site of L’Auvergnat de Paris. The right to invoice a regulated price for a compulsory filing in the capital is held, in two cases out of three, by a website.

What a new applicant must prove is set out in décret n° 2019-1216, and it is short. The service must be registered with the CPPAP; it must not be principally advertising; it must have been published for more than six months; it must carry « un volume substantiel d’informations originales dédiées à ce même département » renewed at least weekly, evidenced over at least seven weeks; and it must meet an audience minimum, which for a free site is a number of certified weekly visits from that département. There is no capital requirement, no fee on the application and no professional body to join.

On 12 September 2026, décret n° 2026-862 replaced the annexe that carries those audience minima, and in most départements it moved them down. The préfecture du Nord states the new figures for the 2027 campaign plainly: 3,326 copies of certified paid circulation, or 16,630 weekly visits — against 5,400 and 27,000 before. In Paris the reported pair is 1,985 and 9,925, which is 1,418 visits a day, and which is 48.7% below the old 19,350. The online minimum is exactly five times the print minimum in every département, before and after, which is the tell: the state is pricing an online reader at a fifth of a paying subscriber and has just decided the exchange rate was too harsh.

That is the non-consensus reading. The barrier in this market was never money and is no longer, in most of France, even a large audience; it is six months of genuine weekly local reporting and an annual administrative decision that is never automatic. And the one condition that looks impossible — that the content be « composé d’informations ayant fait l’objet d’un traitement à caractère journalistique » — has three doors, written into article D.18 III of the code des postes et des communications électroniques and article 72 de l’annexe III au CGI. Door A is a salaried professional journalist. Door B is invoices from an agence de presse agréée under the ordonnance du 2 novembre 1945, « datant de moins d’un an ». Door C is the specialised or technical title with an editorial committee that meets two of three tests, one of which is simply being a publisher « créé depuis moins de deux ans, employant moins de dix personnes ». A micro-entreprise registered this month satisfies that test by existing.

Who is on the other side of the trade? The incumbents, and the décret looks after them where it hurts them. In the six départements where the minima rose, supports already habilitated in 2026 « seront réputés atteindre, pour les années 2027, 2028 et 2029, le nouveau seuil » [shall be deemed to reach, for 2027, 2028 and 2029, the new threshold] provided they still meet the old one. The state lowered the door for new entrants in most of the country and, where it raised the door, exempted everyone already inside it for three years. A new applicant gets neither the grandfathering nor the three years.

And the arithmetic is not the obstacle people assume either. Insee counts 301,300 sociétés created in France in 2025, of which Bpifrance’s Observatoire puts 49,493 in Paris alone. Split equally across the 29 Paris supports, that is 1,706.66 constitutions each, €339,624.38 a year at the SAS forfait. The target on this page needs 347.1 notices — 20.34% of an equal share, and 0.70% of the département’s company formations. The constraint on this route is not the volume of the market. It is the door, and then the distribution.