Governmental Cost to Register a Trademark
When it comes to the cost to register a trademark, there are two parts to that. The first part is the government fees that you pay to the government to get it done. And the whole thing starts with the filing fees. These are the most basic trademark registration costs. In most countries, the filing fee will depend on the number of classes of goods and services in which you file your trademark application.
There are countries, for example, Canada, that currently has a single filing fee regardless of how many products and services are going into your application. But most of the time, the more products and services mean the more you pay as a filing fee.
Post-Allowance Fees and Other Trademark Registration Costs
There is also the fee called the post-allowance fee, which is a trademark registration cost, as the name suggests, that’s paid after the trademark’s allowed. After your trademark gets allowed, in certain cases you would have to pay an additional fee to get your trademark from “allowed” to “registered.”
Sometimes, there are also government fees in the middle when you require some extra time to respond to whatever the Trademark Office may throw at you. For example, you got an office action, and they gave you a 6-month deadline.
You will have the time to answer that in time, you may request an extension of time and sometimes it may come with a relatively small fee for you to be able to do that.
These fees are usually relatively minor ones but can make it difficult to anticipate when budgeting a precise price. It’s also hard to anticipate which may affect your individual trademark application. So that's the government fee and you can not get away from them.
Paying for the Professionals: Multiple Approaches
The second part of the cost to register a trademark is what you pay professionals to do the work for you. Whether you chose to undertake this yourself or rely on professional help registering your trademark, there are costs involved whether that’s money or time.
If you're doing everything yourself, you don't pay any money obviously to do this for you. What you're paying with is your time—and sometimes it's a valid decision if you really know what you're doing. But if you're hiring somebody else to help you with that, you'd pay them whatever they charge you.
These firms should also be knowledgeable about the trademarking process, which can be a very valuable insight if this is your first trademark or you’re otherwise new to the process.
So, there are different ways to approach that. Most firms have a combined system where they have a flat fee to file your trademark application and then they have a whole catalog of fees for each and every little step that they are going to inevitably take to get your trademark through.
And they'd sent you a 3-page or a 2-page schedule of fees and most business owners have no idea how to look at that.
All-Inclusive Trademark Registration Costs with Trademark Factory
That's really why I came up with the idea of Trademark Factory in our All-Inclusive Package, where you pay one flat fee and it covers everything from start to finish.
Whoever you're going to use, look at what you are being promised and what you are paying for. Make sure that you are comparing apples to apples. You can't really compare somebody's fee for filing your trademark to somebody else's fee to take care of the entire process from start to finish.
Visit our website to learn more about how much does a trademark cost and how we can help you.