Is a Patent Worth the Cost?
Filing a patent means paying attorney fees and USPTO filing costs up front, then annual maintenance fees to keep it in force. Skip it, and you risk a competitor copying your idea and eating into your market or simply taking your technology outright. This calculator takes your total filing and maintenance cost, the expected loss if your idea gets copied, and the probability that copying actually happens, and compares your total patent cost against the probability-weighted expected loss. A positive defense value means the expected protection is worth more than what you're spending; a negative one means the pure dollars-and-cents case is weaker.
When deciding whether to file, it's worth weighing this defense value alongside how technically hard your product actually is to copy and how fast competitors could reach the market on their own. Even when the defense value comes out low, core technology can still be worth protecting as a trade secret instead, especially if the underlying process is hard for outsiders to reverse-engineer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Base it on how quickly similar ideas tend to get copied in your industry and how low the barrier to entry is. If you can't pin down an exact figure, a conservative range like 30-50% is a reasonable starting point.
This calculation compares purely financial costs and benefits. Patents also have hard-to-quantify value in fundraising, valuation, and negotiating leverage, so companies often file strategically even when the number is negative.
Attorney fees, USPTO filing fees, and examination fees are the basics. If you're pursuing international protection, add foreign counsel fees for each country you file in.
※ Actual loss and probability vary widely by industry and technology. This is an estimate for reference only.