how much does it cost to get a patent?

Answer 1

There are a number of issues to consider:

1) Each patent is for a country (e.g. the US) or a region (e.g. Europe) and so a separate patent will be required for each country and region in which you wish to have protection for your invention.

2) For each patent, there will be two main types of fees. The first of these are government fees required by the patent offices of each country to process a patent application through to grant and to keep the resulting patent in force. These fees are unavoidable, and vary in magnitude depending on the country or region. You can find out these fees from the patent office website of the relevant country. The second type of fee is the patent attorney fee for writing and handling your patent application. For your own country, you could simply write it yourself and avoid these fees, but this may be a false economy, because a "home made" patent application could turn out to be worthless. The services of a patent attorney do not come cheap. For foreign countries, you may need to use an attorney anyway, and translations may also be necessary, which can also be expensive.

All in all, it can cost a fortune to get a patent, but it can also cost a fortune not to.

Good luck!

Answer 2

It depends on the complexity of the process or product you are patenting. The cost for preparing and filing a U.S. patent application is the U.S. government filing fee, plus the attorney's fees. Unfortunately, you will not know the actual cost until the patent application is written and the claims are counted.

The basic U.S. government filing fee is rather complex but the schedule can be viewed at the Patent Office website = http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/o...

The basic filing fee = $1000 ($300 filing, $500 search, $200 examination). The issue fee well go up from $1330 to $1400. Small entities will have a 50% discount.

"The attorney's fees for writing a good patent application will typically be at least several thousand U.S. dollars, depending on many factors. One factor is whether the inventor can supply a good written description with drawings, in which case the attorney's fees will be reduced." "If the invention is very complex, the attorney's fees will be increased. To write an application for a complex software-implemented invention, for example, attorney's fees may exceed US$10,000." "In any event, it may be possible to limit the attorney's fees to comply with a certain budget. If the budget is too low, however, the quality of the patent application may be affected."

In the case of the patent applications which I have completed for previous employers, as an administrative assistant, I drafted the patent application and submited it to an attorney for review and filing. In these cases the attorney fees were reduced to around $500. The patent applications themselves cost my employer less than $1,000 in filing fees. (We filed for patent of a business process and not a product.)

Contact me through my Yahoo Profile if you need additional help.

Answer 3

$19.95