California is ridiculous with their fees. If it were me, I'd register the LLC in another state and pay a registered agent fee (you need a physical address in the state you register the LLC). Here's one for $99/yr:
https://startupsavant.com/best-registered-agent-services#zen...
Living in CA and having the LLC in another state might have some tax implications you could review with an accountant.
My business partner and I initially setup a partnership for rubylane.com, but then had to change it to a regular corp because once we actually had income, we were going to have to each file personal state returns in every state we had customers, ie, all 50. As a regular corp (and probably an LLC), you only file in the corporation's state. According to our CA accountant, an S-election would have put us back into the situation of needing to file personal returns for every state we had customers.
There are other tax implications you should review with an accountant, for example, if you setup a regular corp (no S-election) and decide to leave money in the corportion, you will get taxed on it at corporate rates, whereas if you pay it to yourself, you'll get taxed at your personal rate.
Another thing to keep in mind: everyone thinks that corporations provide some magic liability protection, and that is somewhat true when a group of people form the corporation. But if you are the only officer, a corporation doesn't provide much protection IMO: anything liability incurred by the corporation is obviously caused by you, so "piercing the corporate veil" is not much more than paperwork. Just my opinion. You'd be better off with an umbrella insurance policy - again, just my opionion as I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant.