How much does a Patent Cost?

A Utility Patent costs, on average, between $7,000 – $20,000.
A Provisional Patent Application costs $60 to file yourself with the USPTO.
The cost to have a patent lawyer write your Provisional Patent Application is between $5,000 – $10,000 on average.
The cost for The Pragmatic Penguin’s done-for-you Patent Service is just £499.00

In conclusion, the range of cost to put “Patent Pending” on your marketing materials is between $60 – $20,000.

How much does a patent cost? It’s not just the price tag that matters.

I’d like to share a statistic that’s pretty shocking…

97% of patents never earn more money than they cost.

That means 97% of patents lost money for the inventors that bought them. And when the average patent costs $7000-20000, that’s outrageous.

Hundreds of thousands of patents are getting filed every year. If you multiple the number of patents by the average cost, and take 97% of that, it’s about $8,000,000,000.

Do you think that money could be better spent elsewhere?

I do!

That’s why I developed a done-for you Patent Service so that you can protect your idea for under $1,000 and test your idea for 12 months to make sure it is a good one.

Patent Success - FREE PDF Guide

Download the Patent Success PDF by filling out this form:

The Different Types of Patents

Provisional Patent Application

A provisional patent application (also known as a starter patent) lets you put patent-pending on your marketing materials for 12 months.

This 12 months is precious time to test just how successful and profitable your invention is going to be.

You should always do this testing before buying an expensive long-term patent. Always. No exceptions.

Then if after 12 months things are going well, you can upgrade to the expensive long-term utility patent.

You’ll know that it’s a wise investment, that will bring long-term value.

Make the business profitable first, and then buy the expensive patent.

One of the great things about Provisional Patents is that when you upgrade to a utility patent, the utility patent will adopt the original filing date of the Provisional Patent.

Remember, it is the first person to patent an idea who gets the rights to it, not the first person to have the idea. Don’t delay protecting your idea with this low cost, effective method.

Get a Provisional Patent Application with our done-for-you Patent Service.

We have written thousands of PPAs, have years of experience, and know the very best methods for writing and submitting PPAs.

Let us take care of your patent, so you can forget it and move on to the fun stuff.

Utility Patent

The widespread problem with the patent industry is simply a matter of bad timing – doing things in the wrong order.

Utility patents are a fantastic tool intended to encourage you and make inventing more worthwhile.

They give you 20 years to profit from your invention. And then at the end of the 20 years, your technology becomes accessible by anyone, and the whole world can benefit from it any way they choose.

But people are being told to buy traditional patents at the wrong time, by people who don’t have enough real-world business experience to understand why.

Why do Utility patent applications typically cost thousands of dollars?

What you are paying for is the lawyer’s time. When filing a full utility patent, you will need to hire a lawyer to do a formal patent search – which on average costs between $2,000 – $3,000.

The heart of a utility patent, the thing that defines what it is that you are protecting are the claims.

The reason the Pragmatic Penguin is able to charge you a relatively small fee is that we don’t draft claims for you, as they do not go on a Provisional Patent Application. If we were drafting claims for you, the price would shoot up dramatically. They are extremely important and we take them very seriously.

If the claims are not written properly, it may leave gaps in your protection that others can take advantage of. If there are weaknesses in your utility patent, people may be able to get around them and the patent will be rendered useless.

Other reasons a utility patent can end up being quite expensive is that patent lawyers often manage a team of specialists: technicians with expertise in the field, designers to create the product drawings, and paralegals who manage all of the filings.

In addition to the cost of preparing and filing your utility patent, the lawyer may need to negotiate with the patent office on your behalf. Each response your attorney sends to the patent office can cost over a thousand dollars and the patent office can make several rejections.

Starting with a PPA enables you to file a utility patent with confidence

The whole point of filing a Provisional Patent Application first and using your 12 month window to test the business to make sure it is successful, means that when you are ready to upgrade to a full utility patent, you will be able to invest your precious time and money with confidence.

You can spend thousands of dollars on a utility patent because you have already confirmed that there is long term value in your invention.

Design Patents

A design patent protects the ornamental design of a functional item. In other words, it protects how something looks.

In general, they’re a lot less useful and robust than a well written PPA/utility patent.

The problem is that they’ll protect the very specific ornamental design shown in your drawings only. All that’s needed to circumvent the design patent is to change the appearance slightly. So your protection is limited and relatively easy to workaround.

A design patent can be useful if the function of the invention is heavily dependent on its unique shape, for example a paper clip. However, this condition is rare.

If you have an invention that works in a unique way, or is used in a unique way, for the most part you’ll be better off with a PPA/utility patent.

Design patents are commonly used to protect things like jewelry, furniture, and packaging.

I offer a Free PDF guide that will teach you how to use various search engines to search for actual products and companies similar to your invention, rather than patents. Yes, that’s FREE instead of $3,000 for a method that is more effective and efficient than the traditional way!

Do It Yourself

You can file provisional patent applications for your own inventions. The filing fee to submit the application to the USPTO is only $60, but there is a catch.

As with many things, when you watch an expert do it, it looks easy. The patent lawyer who taught me how to write and file PPAs was a consummate pro, he was definitely an expert. He glided through it effortlessly. When I tried to do it for the first time, not so much…

I felt clunky and it took days, but I got it done. And I felt very proud of myself. Then a letter came in the mail from the patent office. I had done it wrong. Whoops!

I started over and did it again. Boom, success! I was able to do it in much less time, and I corrected the mistake I had made. Time to dance a happy dance.

Then another letter came in the mail… I had made a different mistake!

This happened again and again.

The page size is too big…

The page size is too small…

You filled out the forms wrong…

This file type isn’t compatible with our filing system…

You named the file incorrectly…

What followed was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of phone calls to the patent office.

You may be thinking I’m a dumbass at this point, but honestly, I’m not.

To put it politely, the patent office online filing system is…sensitive. To put it less politely, it’s downright picky and temperamental.

As a funny example, the patent office provides forms you can fill out electronically and attach to your application.

But… here’s the funny part, the forms aren’t compatible with their filing system. You read that right, the patent office provides forms that aren’t compatible with the patent office online filing system. But… rant over.

We’ve done the hard work for you!

The Pragmatic Penguin team and I have been writing Provisional Patent Applications for over 8 years. After many years and hundreds of applications for myself and others, the system works perfectly every time.

You don’t have to learn everything from scratch, cobbling it together from tons of different sources, I have done the hard part for you.

What starts out as one filing fee of $60 can end up costing $1,000 or more depending on how many mistakes you make.

Save yourself the time and stress, and let The Pragmatic Penguin team take care of the PPA for you, so you can move on to the fun stuff.