You can watch your own trademark for free. Not a trial, not a demo, not a 14 day guest pass. The European Union Intellectual Property Office and the USPTO both give you alert tools at zero cost, and if you own one brand in one country you should set them up this afternoon.
I am not going to tell you free is useless, because it is not. I have spent enough time inside these registers to know exactly where free stops, and it stops in three places. Here is the free setup first, then the three gaps, so you can decide which side of the line you are on.
Set the free watch first, it takes five minutes
The EUIPO runs two alert types inside eSearch plus, and both are free once you have a login.
- A watch alert. You run an advanced search, then click the megaphone icon above the results and tick the box to receive the alert by email. From then on you are told when a new application meets those same criteria.
- A monitor alert. You open one trade mark and follow it. You get told when its status changes, when it is due for renewal, when the opposition period closes, and when an identical .eu domain gets registered.
In the United States, the USPTO publishes new applications in the Official Gazette every Tuesday, and Trademark Search costs nothing. WIPO's Global Brand Database is free too, and it is where Madrid designations show up.
Cost of all of that. Zero. Do it before you read the rest, because it is strictly better than the nothing that most brand owners have in place today.
What a free alert is really matching
The EUIPO describes its watch alert as firing when a new trade mark complies with the criteria of the search you saved. That one sentence is the whole story.
The criteria are the words you typed, the classes you ticked, and sometimes the applicant name. A saved search for NIKE in class 25 fires on NIKE in class 25. It does not fire on a filing that sounds like NIKE, looks like NIKE, or spells NIKE in a different alphabet, because none of those contain the string you searched for.
That is not a flaw in the tool. A keyword alert is a keyword alert. The problem is that a lookalike filing is built to survive exactly that.
Gap one. The spellings you did not type
Look at what actually gets filed next to a short, successful brand name.
- A doubled letter. NIKEE.
- A digit swapped for a letter. N1KE, with a one where the I should be.
- A space or a hyphen pushed into the middle. NI KE.
- A Cyrillic letter that renders as a Latin one. The Cyrillic letter that looks like H is not an H.
- Your name sitting inside a longer one. NIKE SPORT HOUSE, filed in a class you sell in.
Every one of those is a real tactic and none of them contains the four letters you own. This is the gap our character-fraud layer exists for, more than 22,000 patterns of it, and it is the reason a text match alone is not a watch. It is a spell check.
Gap two. One register at a time
Free alerts live inside one office. The EUIPO tells you about EU trade marks. The German office tells you about German ones. The Czech office tells you about Czech ones. If you saved one search, you are watching one door in a building with twenty seven of them.
The asymmetry matters more than the count. A single EU trade mark filed by a lookalike threatens your position in all member states at once, and it is one filing to catch. But if the only alert you set up sits at your national office, that filing never appears in front of you.
On our side, every EU country watch includes EU trade marks and Madrid designations inside the country price, so a watch on Germany is not only Germany. If you want to see how the coverage shakes out across the map, the list of all 55 registers with the price of each one is public and it is generated from the live price feed rather than typed by hand.
Gap three. Noticing is the hard part, not the deadline
The clocks are short and they do not move.
- United States. 30 days from publication in the Official Gazette to oppose.
- European Union. 3 months from publication in Part A of the EU Trade Marks Bulletin, and the opposition fee is 320 euro.
Three months sounds generous until you count the weeks you were busy. A gazette read once a week gives up 5 of your 30 American days before anybody looks at the filing. A monthly routine gives up most of the window and you never get an extension.
A free alert also arrives as a message, not a file. No applicant, no classes summary, no publication date sitting next to it. You open the register and work it out yourself, which is fine for one filing and not fine for eleven arriving in the same week.
| Question | A free alert | A watched register |
|---|---|---|
| What it fires on | the words and classes you typed | similar spelling, sound, look and character tricks |
| How many offices | the one office you searched | 55, with EUTM and Madrid inside each country |
| When you hear about it | when you log in and look | daily, weekly or monthly, your choice |
| What arrives | the filing record | the record with applicant, classes and dates |
Where free is the right answer
Be honest with yourself, then stay free if all of these are true.
- One brand.
- One or two registers.
- One product line, one class of goods.
- Somebody in the business actually enjoys checking.
That is a real segment, it is not a failure, and I am not going to talk you out of it.
Where a paid watch earns the price
The moment you sell in three countries, or your name is short enough to be worth copying, the arithmetic changes. Our own version, so you can hold it against whatever else you are looking at.
- 55 registers read from one account, national offices plus EUIPO plus WIPO Madrid.
- 5 AI watch agents and 11 detection layers on every filing, not a tier you upgrade into later.
- Alerts daily, weekly or monthly, your choice.
- EU trade marks and Madrid designations included in every country price.
- 6 to 15 dollars a month per country. United States 12, Germany 12, France 9, United Kingdom 9, Czechia 9.
- No annual contract, and the price is on the page before you sign up rather than after a call.
We are not the cheapest thing you can buy in every scenario, and I would rather say that than have you find it out. If your budget is 40 dollars a year and you sell in one country, several vendors will serve you fine and you should compare their published numbers. If you sell in four countries, four separate single register tools is not a product you can actually buy, and that is the case our per country model exists for.
If you want to check the arithmetic against the rest of the market first, I wrote the published prices of the alternatives and the wider cost picture side by side.
What no tool does
A watch tells you that a filing exists, with the record attached. It does not decide whether two marks are confusingly similar, it does not file the opposition, and it does not replace your attorney. Those are judgment calls with legal consequences and they belong to a person.
What a watch buys is time inside a window that does not reopen. That is the whole product.
Do this today
Set the EUIPO alert and read one USPTO gazette. That is free, it is five minutes, and it is better than what most brands have, which is nothing.
Then answer one question. Do you sell in more than one register? If the answer is yes, start with the market that hurts most and see what arrives in the first week. You can add a country or stop whenever you want, and nobody will call you.
Not legal advice. I am not a lawyer, and nothing here replaces one.