Sob story. In the dotcom era, I lost a trademark to squatter who sold it to a bigger company. Guess what? My lawyer said it was never mine because the squatter had "priority." Didn't matter that I had the domain name and first use in my state California!

So say you have a biz idea / project, you spend on the build, but you know you have protect your brand. You have limited capital, and yep, it's now $350 per class in the US. One TM for a SaaS is $1000+ with 3 classes. I'm not counting lawyer fees. It's just not gonna happen.

I made FiledMark.com out of budget necessity for my own projects. We register your brand in a Paris treaty country for a fraction of the price which the USPTO has to follow like a robot. That gives you six months of coverage. If you take off, you have priority registration anywhere, including the US, that sweeps away any claimants. If your brand doesn't take off, you're just out $170 not $1000+.

Call it existential brand insurance.

In case you're wondering, we register you in the PH, which is a very good tech-centric country to have a trademark in anyway. So for that $100 or so you still have a trademark there no matter what. Legal? Yes, Disney did this for a Pixar registration and it held up, so did a bunch of other companies. Good enough for them, good enough for us.