Comparison
Choosing a USPTO trademark API in 2026
Six real options, from the USPTO's own free endpoints to enterprise screening platforms. We build one of these, so we've kept the comparison to facts you can verify on each provider's site.
Last updated July 2026
The landscape at a glance
| Provider | Coverage | Search | Pricing model | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Markbase | USPTO — 14M+ US marks | Fuzzy, typo-tolerant, autocomplete, clearance scoring | Flat monthly: free tier, $49, $149 | 1,000 req/mo no key, 5,000 signed up | US-focused products that need real search |
| USPTO TSDR (official) | USPTO — full register | None — retrieval by serial/registration number only | Free (API key, rate-limited) | Yes, entirely free | Status checks on marks you already track |
| MarkerAPI | USPTO | Search by name, owner, serial, description, expiration | Flat monthly tiers | Trial | Budget US-only lookups |
| RapidAPI wrappers | USPTO (varies by wrapper) | Basic search, varies by provider | Per-request freemium via RapidAPI | Small request quotas | Quick experiments inside RapidAPI |
| Signa | 200+ offices globally, 147M+ records | Fuzzy, phonetic and visual similarity, monitoring | Credit-based (operations cost 1–5 credits) | Free signup tier | Products needing multi-country coverage |
| Corsearch / CompuMark | Global, 1,000+ databases | Analyst-grade screening platforms | Enterprise contracts, no self-serve | No | Law firms and enterprise brand protection |
How to actually decide
Start with coverage. US-only products don't need — or want to pay for — 200 offices. Global products shouldn't stitch together per-country APIs. This one question eliminates most of the table.
Then pricing model. Flat monthly plans make costs predictable as you scale; credit systems mean estimating how many credits each of your features burns per user action. Per-request marketplace pricing gets expensive fastest.
Then search quality. Record retrieval is a solved problem — the USPTO does it for free. What you're really buying is search: typo tolerance, ranking, autocomplete latency, similarity scoring. Test each candidate with your ugliest real queries before committing.
Where Markbase honestly fits
We're the US-focused option with real search and flat pricing. If you need EU or WIPO coverage today, we're not your API — a global platform is. If your product lives on USPTO data, you get the full 14M-record index with fuzzy search, clearance scoring, and owner lookups at $0, $49, or $149 a month — and you can verify all of it from curl before you sign up, because the keyless tier doesn't ask for anything.
Start with a free API key
Try any endpoint from curl right now — then sign up free for a key, higher limits, and usage analytics.
Frequently asked questions
What's the best free option?
For status lookups on marks you already know, the official USPTO TSDR API — it's free and authoritative. For actual search by name, Markbase's free tier is the fastest way to start: 1,000 requests/month with no key, or 5,000 with a free account.
Do I need global coverage?
If your users file or enforce outside the US, yes — look at a multi-office platform. If your product is US-focused (most naming tools, US registrars, US legal software), a dedicated USPTO API is simpler and considerably cheaper.
Why not just use the USPTO's own APIs?
They're excellent for record retrieval but offer no search: no fuzzy matching, no autocomplete, no owner or similarity queries. Building that yourself means parsing daily bulk XML and running your own search index.