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Estrecho IA
Estrecho IA

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USPTO trademark data is free and painful — we are demand-testing a watch API before building it

#api #data #opensource

USPTO trademark data is free and public. That is exactly the problem.

I have spent the last few weeks working with public government data (before that: SEC filings, which have the same disease). Trademark data from the USPTO — the Trademark Status & Document Retrieval (TSDR) system and the Open Data Portal — is complete, authoritative and free. It is also scattered, rate-limited, XML-heavy, and completely without any notification mechanism. If you have ever needed to know, programmatically:

  • whether a mark is live, dead, or abandoned (and when that changed),
  • whether an office action was issued (they carry strict response deadlines),
  • whether a confusingly similar mark was filed in your class,
  • or whether an owner/assignee changed,

...you know the drill: TSDR rate limits, bulky XML, no webhooks, no watch lists. Trademark attorneys and brand teams pay people to babysit dockets for exactly this. Everyone else ends up with a spreadsheet and a recurring calendar reminder.

The idea we are testing

MarkWatch — a developer-friendly API for:

  • status lookup: serial number, registration number or owner → current status, dates, classes, clean JSON;
  • watch lists: watch marks, owners or classes, get alerted on status change;
  • webhook + email alerts: pushed to you; no polling, no babysitting.

Planned pricing (indicative, not final): $0 free tier (250 lookups/mo), $19/mo Starter (5k lookups + 10 watched marks + email alerts), $49/mo Pro (50k lookups + 100 watched marks + webhooks + bulk export).

Honest framing (important)

Nothing is built yet. This article is the demand test. We will report the numbers publicly and honestly — including if they are low. A waitlist tells us you are curious; choosing a plan tells us you would pay. If you would use something like this, pick the plan you would choose here:

https://markwatch.onrender.com (no card, no payment — just intent)

Questions welcome

TSDR vs Open Data Portal bulk, webhook delivery design, status semantics, whether a "similar marks in class X" scan should be part of v1 — all genuinely open. We are an honest small operator: no enterprise sales team, no meetings, no lock-in. If the demand test fails, we say so, and we do not build it.

Data source: USPTO (public domain). Not affiliated with or endorsed by USPTO. Not legal advice.

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