The attorney wanted thousands just to check if my idea was already patented

It turns out the "inventor tax" is about $1,500. That’s what a preliminary patent search costs through an attorney — just to find out if someone else thought of your idea first.

Most founders either burn thousands on a report they can’t decipher or they build blindly and hope a cease-and-desist letter doesn't arrive in three years. ChatGPT doesn't help here either; it will confidently hallucinate patent numbers that don't exist because it’s guessing what a filing should look like rather than searching 120 million real records.

I’m building a reasoning engine that reads the fine print of actual legal claims across the EPO database. It pulls the 10 closest matches and gives you a plain-English verdict on novelty for $30. No subscription, just a single report you can actually read.

Two questions for the builders here:

1. When you have a product idea, do you actually check for patents, or do you just build and hope "being first" is enough protection?

2. Is $30 the kind of price where you'd just run it for peace of mind, or does checking for patents still feel like a waste of time compared to finding customers?

If you want to see what a report looks like, reply and I'll send you a sample PDF.

If you're interested in early access: https://tally.so/r/pbPzZ8