Checking a name is genuinely free: domain, trademark and handles

A name is yours in any useful sense only when three separate registers come back clean: the domain registry, the trademark office, and whichever handle namespaces you'll genuinely post on. None of them talks to the others. An available .com tells you nothing about trademark exposure. A quiet trademark register tells you nothing about the dormant account squatting your name on Instagram. All three need checking, and the first pass costs nothing and takes about an hour.

Order matters. Start with the check that kills the most candidates fastest.

Search boxes lie by omission

Some tools report "available" for names that are registered but not resolving. Others hide names they've classed as premium, or slide alternatives in front of you without mentioning that the original is long gone. The registry is the only authority worth trusting, and there are two free ways to ask it directly.

• WHOIS or RDAP lookup. A record with a creation date and a registrar means the name is registered. No match means it genuinely isn't. Contact details are usually redacted under privacy rules, but you don't need them; the existence of the record is the answer.
• DNS lookup. Registered names usually have nameservers assigned. Absence of nameservers proves nothing on its own, since plenty of registered names sit parked with nothing pointed at them. Supporting signal, not verdict.

Registered does not mean unavailable. A large share of registered .coms are held by people who would sell at the right number, which makes "taken" a pricing question rather than a closed door. If you want the name anyway, you've moved from availability to acquisition, and that runs on a different process and a different budget.

You can also sidestep the guesswork. Searching by keyword across names already listed for sale hands you a shortlist where availability isn't in dispute: everything shown is purchasable now, at a stated price or by offer.

Thirty seconds more, well spent. Type the name into a search engine and see whether the .com resolves to something alive. A parked page is a negotiation. A trading company with real customers is a reason to walk away, whatever the trademark register happens to say.

The check founders skip, and the rebrand it causes

Trademarks are the search people put off, and the one that can force a rebrand two years in, once the packaging is printed and the app is in the stores. The primary databases are public and free.

• United States: the USPTO's trademark search system covers registered and pending marks. Search the exact word first, then the obvious phonetic and spelling variants.
• European Union: EUIPO's eSearch covers EU trade marks.
• Global sweep: WIPO's Global Brand Database queries many national registers at once. Quickest way to discover your name is a registered mark in a country you'd never considered.
• Home register: the UK IPO, IP Australia, CIPO in Canada and their equivalents all offer free public search.

Two things shape how you read the results. Marks are registered in classes covering particular goods and services, so an identical mark in a class nowhere near yours is often survivable, while an identical mark in your own class usually isn't. And the test is not identity, it's likelihood of confusion. "Kleeno" and "Cleano" in the same class are a problem despite the different strings. Search the way a customer would mishear the name, not the way you'd spell it.

Then look for unregistered use. Common-law and passing-off rights can arise in the US and UK purely from trading under a name, with no registration at all. A plain web search, a companies-register search (Companies House, your state's Secretary of State, or the local equivalent) and an app-store search will surface most active users. If a competitor has been trading under the name for five years, an empty trademark register is cold comfort.

Handles are the cheapest check and the most annoying

Work through the platforms you'll actually use, not the full list. B2B companies mostly need LinkedIn, X, perhaps GitHub. Consumer brands should care far more about Instagram and TikTok than either.

Method: open each platform, try to load platform.com/yourname, read what comes back. A 404 usually means free. A dormant account with three posts from 2013 means taken, and reclaim processes are slow, inconsistent and largely closed to you unless you hold a registered trademark.

Don't let a handle veto a good name. Prefixes and suffixes such as getname, nameHQ or wearename are entirely normal and cost almost nothing in recognition. An exact-match .com with a slightly modified Instagram handle is a much stronger position than a perfect handle attached to a compromised domain.

Round the pass off with an app-store search if you're shipping an app, a check that the name isn't an unfortunate word in a language you sell into, and a test of how it survives being read aloud down a bad phone line.

Cheap killers first

Sequence saves effort, because each check eliminates candidates and the cheapest eliminations should come earliest.

• Shortlist ten to fifteen names. Any fewer and you'll fall in love with one you can't have.
• Registry check first. Seconds per name, and it removes the most candidates. Mark which are unregistered, which are for sale, which are in live use.
• Trademark screen the survivors. Ten minutes each. The list usually halves again here.
• Handle check the final three. At this stage you're choosing, not filtering.
• Only now spend money. Acquire the domain and file the mark reasonably close together, so you're not paying to hold a name that turns out to be unusable.

If you'd rather begin from names that have already cleared the availability step, browsing a curated marketplace collapses the first check into a filter. Checks two and three are still on you.

What an hour of free searching cannot buy

What you've run is a knockout search. It catches obvious collisions and stops there. It won't find the near-miss mark in an adjacent class that an examiner will cite, it won't weigh how strong an existing mark is, and it won't tell you how a particular national office treats descriptive terms.

A professional clearance search with an opinion typically runs into the high hundreds or low thousands, depending on jurisdiction and how many countries you're covering. Pay for it when you're raising money, when you're walking into a crowded category, when the name is central to the business rather than decoration, or when your own search turned up something borderline and you can't judge how bad it is. Skip it while you're testing an idea that may not exist in six months.

The expensive mistake is doing all this in reverse: domain bought, packaging printed, trademark discovered. Both of the searches that would have prevented it are free.