Filed online, a UK trademark application costs £205 for one class. A registered design costs £60. For a patent, official fees alone come to at least £405, before anyone has drafted a claim for you. Those are UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) figures as at July 2026; fees rose by roughly 25% on 1 April 2026, so older articles quote lower numbers. For a founder whose whole protection budget is a few hundred pounds, the useful question is sequence: what comes free, what is cheap, and what should wait until the business can justify it.
Start with what costs nothing
The most expensive intellectual property (IP) problems in early-stage companies are ownership gaps, and closing them early costs almost nothing. Copyright made by an employee in the course of their job belongs to the employer; work from a freelancer stays the freelancer’s until it is assigned, and an assignment of a patent, trademark, copyright or registered design is not effective unless it is in writing and signed. The developer who built your prototype before the company existed, or the designer paid a day rate for your packaging, is a hole in your chain of title, and holes in the chain of title are what investors’ lawyers are paid to find. Signed assignments from founders and contractors, taken at the start, cost a template and ten minutes.
Confidentiality is the second free habit. UK patent law demands absolute novelty and gives no general grace period, so your own launch post or demo day can destroy the novelty of an invention before you ever file for it. A disclosure made in confidence does not count as made available to the public, which is why businesses planning a patent keep early conversations under NDA and share only what each meeting needs. The same discipline supports trade secrets, which stay protectable only while you take reasonable steps to keep them secret. Our guide on when to apply for a patent walks through the timing traps.
Some rights simply arrive. Copyright arises automatically when original work is created (code, copy, photographs, drawings), with nothing to register and nothing to pay. UK unregistered design right covers a product’s 3D shape and configuration automatically, and the supplementary unregistered design takes in surface decoration too, for three years from first disclosure, provided that first disclosure happens in the UK. Free rights still reward housekeeping: dated records of who created what, and when, are the evidence you will need if an unregistered right is ever tested.
What a few hundred pounds buys
For most businesses the first registration worth buying is a trademark for the name or logo, because whatever the product does, the brand is public from day one. £205 buys an online application covering one class of goods or services, £60 covers each additional class, and a registration lasts ten years before it needs renewing. Classes are the categories the register uses to organise goods and services, and they are where the strategy lives: cover what you sell now and what you will credibly sell soon, then stop. You can narrow a specification after filing but you cannot add to it, so coverage you never claimed means a fresh application at full fees.
Whether to file yourself is a fair question, and plenty of founders manage the process without help. What £205 does not buy is a conflict check with teeth since 2007 the IPO will not refuse your application because an earlier similar mark exists. It notifies that mark’s owner instead, and any opposition is theirs to bring. Paying a chartered trade mark attorney or other trademark professional buys a proper search before you commit to the name, plus a specification drafted to survive scrutiny. Whether that insurance is worth the fee depends on how crowded your corner of the register is and what a forced rebrand would cost.
If your product’s appearance matters, registered designs are the bargain of the system. Registration for one design can cost £60 online, and £85 covers up to ten in a single application. The IPO does not examine novelty, so registration usually comes through within two weeks, and the right renews in five-year steps for up to 25 years. The speed cuts both ways since nobody has checked whether your design is actually new, so a registration can be attacked later and is only as strong as the filing behind it. Designs also forgive publicity in a way patents never do, with a 12-month grace period for your own disclosures before you apply. Our guide on protecting the look of your product in the UK covers the filing details.
Patents: the only-when-justified purchase
Patents sit in a different financial category. The official fees look manageable: £75 to file online, £200 for the search and £130 for examination make up the £405 minimum, and renewal fees then run from £90 in year five to £810 by year 20. The bulk of the real cost is professional time. Drafting claims that will survive examination and still bite on a competitor is specialist work; it is where most of a patent budget actually goes, and foreign filings multiply everything. Grant typically takes several years.
So a patent has to earn its place. Investors in technology-heavy rounds often expect filings to exist, and a licensing model needs a licensable right at its core. Some products are easy enough to reverse-engineer that a registered monopoly is the only protection with real substance, and there is a tax angle too. The Patent Box lets companies pay corporation tax at 10% on qualifying patent profits. Timing matters as well, because a first UK filing starts a 12-month priority year in which to refine the application and extend it abroad—and sometimes the honest answer is to skip the patent and rely on secrecy or speed. Our guide on turning IP into revenue looks at licensing and the Patent Box in more depth.
Help with the bill
There is more free and subsidised support than most founders realise. The UKIPO’s search tools are free, including the One IPO Search service for patents, so you can check the registers for conflicting marks and existing filings before spending anything. A UK network of 25 PatLib centres offers free one-hour IP consultations, and the British Library’s Business & IP Centre does similar work. For part-funded help, the IPO’s IP Advance scheme, launched in 2024, contributes £2,250 towards an IP audit by a qualified professional with the business paying £750; a second level offers up to £2,250 towards acting on the audit’s recommendations, at least half funded by the business. The scheme runs through regional partners such as Innovate UK Business Growth, so check current availability with the partner for your nation or region.
Three ways the budget gets wasted
Three mistakes are worth naming because each is cheap to avoid and expensive to fix. The first is treating a trademark specification as a formality and filing in the wrong classes, or too few of them; the registration only protects what it claims, and the fix is a new application. The second is publicising an invention before filing for it: an excited launch article can destroy the novelty of a patent application planned for the following quarter, and no later spending repairs that. The third is paying contractors without taking signed assignments, which turns money spent on development into IP owned by somebody else—the classic gap that surfaces, expensively, in due diligence.
The order is the strategy
Ownership and confidentiality come first because they are free, and because later money cannot always fix them. The brand and the product’s look come next, while £205 and £60 are still sums the budget can absorb. Patents come last, once the business case is real and, quite often, once someone else’s money is helping to pay for them. A portfolio built in this order tends to hold up when somebody finally reads it closely, and if things go well, somebody will.
If you are deciding which protections deserve your first few hundred pounds, ScalaxIP can help you put them in the right order. Get in touch.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. For advice on your specific circumstances, please contact ScalaxIP at admin@scalaxip.com
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