← TM Watch — free instant similarity check

How much does a trademark watch cost?

Short answer, for one US word mark: nothing if you run the weekly check yourself, $29 to $99 a year for the self-serve services whose prices are published (this site included), and a quote you have to ask for if you want a law firm or an enterprise vendor to do it. Every number below was read off the seller's own page on the date shown; when a figure is more than 90 days old this page marks it in red rather than pretending it is still true.

The published prices, cheapest first

• USPTO trademark search (free): Free (read 2026-09-03) — You search, manually, whenever you remember to
• Markify: $39/yr per mark (US Federal Full) (read 2026-09-03) — Weekly reports by email and online, downloadable (PDF, RTF, Word, HTML, Excel)
• TMReady (formerly The Trademark Search Company): from $59 (duration not stated on the page) (read 2026-09-03) — Analyst-prepared monitoring reports, "real-time alerts"
• Hawthorn Law: $99/yr for up to 5 marks (up to 20 at no extra charge) (read 2026-09-03) — Email notification, plus a free phone conference with the attorney about any conflict found
• TM Watch (this site): $29 for one year, one mark, one payment, no auto-renewal; the first 30 days are free with no card. Word marks from the US Trademark Official Gazette only — hits go to a private alert page and an RSS feed.

Two things are worth saying out loud. At $29 a year we are the lowest per-mark price on this page as of the dates shown (Markify is next at $39), and the prices are re-read on every rebuild, so if that stops being true this sentence changes. Hawthorn Law prices per bundle, not per mark, so from mark 4 onward it is cheaper than any per-mark service on this page, us included. The comparison table shows the same rows with coverage and delivery side by side, including the columns where each of them beats us.

What actually moves the price

1. How many marks. Almost everyone prices per mark. A service that bundles several marks for one fee (Hawthorn Law does) wins for a portfolio and loses for a single name.
2. How many registers. US only is the floor. The vendors above that cover foreign registers (EU, UK, WIPO, “global”) sell them as separate, higher tiers; Markify, for example, lists EU and global prices well above its US figure. We quote only the US price here and only watch the US Gazette.
3. Who reads the hits. An algorithm (us, and most of the cheap tier) sends you every plausible match and leaves the judgement to you. A human analyst or an attorney filters first and, at the top of the range, will get on the phone about a conflict. That is what the higher figures buy.
4. Word marks vs. designs. Logo and design-mark watching needs image comparison and, where it is offered, is a separate product. We do not offer it at all.
5. Delivery. Weekly email reports are the norm. We are honest that email alerts are not built yet — you get a private page and an RSS feed — and that is part of why we are cheap.

The cost that makes the watch fee irrelevant

A watch exists to catch a conflicting application while it is still cheap to act on. Once an application is published, you have 30 days to oppose it; the USPTO's filing fee for a notice of opposition is $600 per class (electronic filing), before any attorney time. Miss the window and the application moves on toward registration; undoing a registration later means a cancellation proceeding at $600 per class, from a weaker position. The opposition-window page walks through the deadlines and the extension fees. Against those numbers, the difference between a $29 watch and a $99 watch is noise; the difference between watching and not watching is not.

When the right price is zero

If you will genuinely check every Tuesday, you do not need to pay anyone. The DIY page gives the exact routine, and the instant similarity check runs the same matcher our paid watch uses, in your browser, against all 361,260 word marks published since 2026-05-05. Paying for a watch buys one thing: it happens whether or not you remember.