The permanence is the part people underestimate. An address entered into a business registration, a domain record, or a business listing propagates into public databases, aggregator files, and marketing lists within weeks. Removing it from the original source afterward does not remove it from the copies, and businesses discover years later that their home address is still returned by searches they cannot influence.
The practical alternatives are inexpensive. A commercial mailbox service provides a street address rather than a post office box, which matters because several registrations and platforms reject box numbers. Coworking spaces frequently offer a registered address as part of a low tier membership. A registered agent service handles the statutory address requirement specifically. Each costs considerably less than most software subscriptions.
Understand which addresses are actually required, because they serve different purposes and can be different. The registered agent address for official service of documents is a legal requirement and is public. The business address on your listings is what customers see. The mailing address for correspondence is a third. Treating all three as one is why a home address ends up everywhere.
For local search there is a specific and important nuance. If customers do not come to you, register as a service area business and hide the address entirely while defining the areas you serve. This is fully supported, it does not harm local visibility, and it means somebody working from home can appear in local results without publishing where they live.
Do not invent an address you have no connection to, which people occasionally attempt for the search benefit. Platforms verify addresses, listings using a location the business does not occupy are removed when detected, and the suspension affects the profile that was producing your customers.
Consider the impression as well as the privacy, since a residential address on a proposal or an invoice reads differently to a business customer than a commercial one. That effect is modest and it is real, particularly for anything sold to larger organisations.
Check what you have already published before deciding this is a future problem. Your domain registration, your business filing, your listings, your invoices, and your email signature are the usual places, and correcting them takes an afternoon while the address is still relatively contained.
Then use the same address consistently everywhere once chosen, in exactly the same format. Consistency across sources is a signal that affects local search, and switching between a home address and a service address in different places produces the disagreement you were trying to avoid.
Check how the address appears on outbound email and invoices as well as in listings, since those reach people directly and are the places most often forgotten after a change. An invoice template carrying an old address will continue doing so for years unless somebody edits it.
Think about mail volume before choosing a service, because the cheapest tiers frequently limit items or charge for forwarding. A business receiving supplier correspondence and cheques has different requirements from one that receives almost nothing, and the difference in cost is small either way.
Update the address at your domain registrar as well, since registration records are public in some circumstances and a home address entered there propagates in the same way as any other listing.
Decide this before your first registration rather than after, since the address you enter on a business filing is the one that becomes public and correcting it later means amending the filing rather than editing a field. That single choice determines most of where the address ends up.