For the community · Free Tee Trademark Check
Check your slogan for trademarks before you list it.
Paste a phrase. A Claude agent searches public USPTO records for live apparel trademarks and explains the risk in plain English — built to answer in about 10 seconds, free for every individual seller.
Our mission: no indie seller should ever lose a shop to a trademark they could have checked in 10 seconds.
- Free forever for individuals
- Open source at launch
- Powered by Claude agents
Informational only — not legal advice.
Why it matters: Etsy, Amazon and Redbubble sellers lose listings — sometimes whole shops — to IP takedowns because a slogan was a registered trademark for clothing (USPTO class 25). Most find out after the strike.
Preview · phrase splitter
Runs in your browserSample result — fictional record · live checks open at launch
“moonlit pickle club”
HIGH RISK- Status
- Live · registered
- Class
- 025 — clothing (t-shirts, hoodies)
- Owner
- Example Apparel Co. (fictional)
- Match
- Exact wording
A live mark covers this exact phrase for shirts. Using it on apparel is likely to trigger a takedown. Pick a different phrase or ask a trademark attorney.
“brine before breakfast”
LOW RISKOnly a dead (abandoned) filing found in class 25. In the live tool, every finding links to its official USPTO record.
Informational only — not legal advice. The phrases and records above are made up to show the format.
Where we're going · first 12 months
Targets, not results. We haven't launched yet.
~500,000
free trademark checks in year one — our goal
80,000 / mo
free checks a month by month 12 — our target
200 shops
in the Catalog Guard Agent beta — our target
What we're building · paid, later
Catalog Guard Agent
One check per slogan is fine for a new design. A shop with hundreds of listings needs something that never stops looking. Catalog Guard is a Claude agent that watches your whole catalog for you.
- Syncs every listing across the marketplaces you sell on.
- Reads everything — titles, tags, descriptions, and the text printed inside each design image.
- Re-scans daily against newly filed marks, so a phrase that was safe last month gets flagged the week someone files it.
- Suggests safe rewrites you approve with one click. It never edits a listing on its own.
Listing title
Moonlit Pickle Club Retro Sunset Tee — Funny Pickle Shirt
Text read from design image
MOONLIT PICKLE CLUB · EST. 2021
Flag: exact match to a live class 25 mark
Found in the title, 2 tags and the design itself. The application was filed after this listing went up — the daily re-scan caught it so you can act early.
Suggested rewrite (re-checked)
Retro Sunset Pickle Lover Tee — Funny Vintage Pickle Shirt
Fictional listing and mark. Buttons shown for illustration.
The agent behind it
A multi-step Claude agent, with a human at the end.
This is the Catalog Guard pipeline. The free checker runs the same steps 2–4 for a single slogan.
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TRIGGER
Shop connected, or a new day of filings
Full scan when a seller connects a shop. Then every day, after new USPTO applications are published.
-
STEP 1 · SYNC
Pull the whole catalog
Titles, tags, descriptions and design images from each marketplace.
Tools: Etsy Open API · CSV / feed import for other marketplaces
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STEP 2 · READ
Extract every phrase
Haiku pulls candidate phrases from listing text. Sonnet reads the text printed inside each design image.
Models: Claude Haiku 5.5 · Claude Sonnet 5.5 (vision)
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STEP 3 · SEARCH
Look up trademark records
Exact, near and sound-alike matches in public USPTO data, filtered to live marks in apparel classes.
Tools: uspto_search · uspto_record
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STEP 4 · JUDGE
Explain the risk
Haiku screens out obvious non-matches. Sonnet weighs status, class, owner and similarity, and writes a plain-English verdict with links.
Models: Claude Haiku 5.5 → Claude Sonnet 5.5
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STEP 5 · REWRITE
Draft safe alternatives
Sonnet proposes new titles and tags. Each rewrite goes back through step 3 before you see it.
Tools: propose_edit · uspto_search
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HUMAN REVIEW
The seller decides. Always.
Flags and rewrites land in a review queue. Nothing changes on a marketplace until the seller approves, edits or dismisses it, and every decision is logged.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 — planner, reader, reviewer, writer
Plans each run, reads text in design images, makes the final risk call, and writes the explanation and the rewrites.
Claude Haiku 5.5 — high-volume extraction and screening
Splits thousands of titles and tags into phrases and filters out clear non-matches, so Sonnet only sees the real candidates.
Why we need Claude API credits
This stage can't run without an LLM.
Trademark risk is a reading problem, not a keyword problem. A phrase split across two lines of a design, a misspelling like “okay-est”, a tag that's harmless alone but not next to the title — keyword filters either miss these or flag everything.
It takes a model that reads like a person, on every listing, every day. That's continuous API usage, not a one-off — and it grows with every seller we reach.
We're planning for scale from day one: half a million free checks in year one, then an agent watching whole catalogs around the clock.
Credits go to the free community tier first. Every free check is paid for by us. Catalog Guard comes later and will be paid for by the sellers who use it.
| Task | Tokens per run (est.) | Runs / month (est.) | Monthly tokens (est.) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extract phrases Haiku 5.5 | ~1.5k in + ~0.3k out = ~1.8k | 40,000 | ~72M |
| Explain USPTO matches Sonnet 5.5 | ~8k in + ~1.2k out = ~9.2k | 40,000 | ~368M |
| Read text in a design image Sonnet 5.5 vision | ~2.5k in + ~0.3k out = ~2.8k | 16,000 | ~44.8M |
| Total | ~484.8M / month | ||
Year one: 40,000 checks a month on average (40% with a design upload) × 12 ≈ 480,000 free checks.
Month-12 target: 80,000 checks / month (32,000 with a design upload) → 1.8k × 80,000 + 9.2k × 80,000 + 2.8k × 32,000 = 144M + 736M + 89.6M = 969.6M tokens / month (just under 1B).
Catalog Guard, for scale: ~6k input + ~1k output tokens per listing audit × 300 listings ≈ 2.1M tokens per full-shop sync; first syncs for a 200-shop beta ≈ 420M tokens. Daily re-scans only re-check listings against that day's new filings. All figures are planning estimates and targets, not measured usage.
Roadmap
The next 24 months.
Free tool first, agent second, then trademark checks built into every place a design goes live. Numbers below are our targets.
NOW
Building the free checker
Phrase extraction and live-mark search for text slogans, plain-English explanations, early-access list.
NEXT · WITHIN 12 MONTHS
Open-source launch, then scale
Free Tee Trademark Check opens to everyone with a public repo under the MIT license, plus design upload. Target: ~500,000 free checks in year one and a 200-shop Catalog Guard beta.
LATER · WITHIN 24 MONTHS
Trademark safety everywhere a design goes live
Catalog Guard Agent generally available, with EU and UK registries added. An open API so design tools and print providers can run the same check before a shirt is ever listed.
FAQ
Questions
Is this legal advice?
No. Tee Search is informational only. It shows what public trademark records say and explains them in plain English. For a decision that matters, talk to a trademark attorney.
Is the free checker really free?
Yes — free forever for individual sellers. We may set a fair daily limit to stop automated abuse. Paid plans are for the Catalog Guard Agent only.
Where does the data come from?
Public USPTO trademark records, so US marks at launch. Every finding links to its official record so you can check it yourself.
Does “low risk” mean I'm safe?
Not by itself. The check covers US registered and pending marks. It doesn't cover copyright in artwork, unregistered (common-law) marks, or other countries.
Is it live yet?
Not yet — we're building it now. Join early access and we'll email you when checks open.