Every time I named a side project, it went the same way. Brainstorm in one tab. Check the .com in another. Get attached to a name. Then weeks later find out it was already trademarked, usually right after I had made the logo.
Most name generators stop at the domain. They will hand you a name whose .com is free and whose trademark is a landmine. The expensive part of naming is not the idea, it is the conflict you do not see until you have already built on the name.
So I built Startup Name Generator to do the whole first pass in one place:
- It only surfaces names whose .com is available, checked live against domain records at generation time. No dead domains in the list.
- Pick one, and it screens the name against the US trademark register, the USPTO, for free. No login, no card.
- The EU register is the one paid step, for people naming for Europe.
To be clear about what it is: the trademark check is a register search that surfaces conflicts for you to review, not legal advice. For anything you are betting a company on, a lawyer still does the clearance. But for the first cut, it saves you from falling for a name you cannot own.
Free at startupnamegenerator.com. There is also an MCP server and API if you want it inside your own tools.
Feedback welcome: is the .com-first, trademark-aware flow useful, or am I solving a problem only I have? Naming stories welcome.
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