Seven free checks, about twenty minutes, run in cost order. This is the step every domain generator skips, and the one that forces renames after launch.
An available domain does not mean an available name. Run seven free checks in cost order: exact-match web search, domain availability, company registry, trademark registries for every market you will sell in, app stores and package registries, social handles, and finally saying it out loud. It takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing. The web search alone kills most candidates in the first thirty seconds.
A team in r/SaaS this month described the failure mode better than any checklist:
"We were building for months under a name four competitors already had. One of them launched six weeks before us."
They renamed at launch. Nothing was legally wrong; the problem was entirely commercial. As they put it, every bit of SEO, every mention, and every "have you seen X" conversation was going to land on someone else's product. None of that shows up in a domain availability check.
A domain checker asks one narrow question: is this exact string registered in this registry? Four different collisions sit outside that question entirely.
All four are free to check, and all four are cheaper to find now than after you have printed anything.
Ordered so the fast, broad signals come first. Most names die at step one, which is the point.
| # | Check | Time | What you are looking for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Exact-match web search, in quotes | 30 seconds | Search the name in quotes, then again with your category word. You are looking for a live company, not a dictionary hit. This single step kills most candidates and it is the one most people skip because they assume the domain check covered it. |
| 2 | Domain availability across .com plus two fallbacks | 1 minute | Unregistered is good but not conclusive. A free domain plus a live competitor on a different extension is the worst outcome, because it looks clear until launch. |
| 3 | Company registry search | 2 minutes | Companies House (UK), the relevant Secretary of State (US), or your national equivalent. Tells you whether the legal entity name is taken in the place you will incorporate. |
| 4 | Trademark search in every market you will sell to | 10 minutes | USPTO (US), EUIPO (EU), UKIPO (UK), CIPO (Canada). Free to search. Check the classes relevant to software, not just the exact string, because a confusingly similar mark in your class is enough to cause a problem. |
| 5 | App store and package registry search | 2 minutes | Apple App Store, Google Play, npm, PyPI. Frequently missed, and a collision here blocks the distribution channel you actually planned to use. |
| 6 | Social handles across the platforms you will use | 3 minutes | You will not get every handle and you do not need to. What you need is one consistent handle you can use everywhere that is not already an active account in your space. |
| 7 | Say it out loud, then spell it down a phone line | 1 minute | If it needs spelling every time, every referral you ever get pays a small tax. Digits and hyphens are the usual culprits, and both are rare in real company domains for exactly this reason. |
On step seven, the data backs the instinct. Only 6.6% of 28,213 payment-verified company domains contain a hyphen and 3.3% contain a digit, because both force every spoken referral to be disambiguated. If your name needs spelling, it is not a small annoyance, it is a permanent tax on word of mouth.
Searching and registering are different decisions with very different costs.
Rarely a lawsuit. Almost always these four, compounding quietly:
Register the same day. A founder writing up their naming process in r/SaaS made the case bluntly: if the name is available, acquire the domains immediately, do not wait even a week. They had lost a .com once by delaying a fortnight, having never mentioned it to anyone. Shortlists leak, and automated squatting tools watch registry and trademark filings.
If you are still generating candidates, the three approaches each have their own data: keyword-led names for categories where customers search for what you do, brandable invented names for funded and launch-led companies, and a generator that checks availability inline so you stop falling for names that are already gone. All of them run off the same free generator.
Run seven checks in cost order, and it takes about twenty minutes in total. Exact-match web search in quotes, domain availability across .com plus two fallbacks, a company registry search where you will incorporate, a trademark search at the USPTO, EUIPO, UKIPO or CIPO for every market you will sell in, an app store and package registry search, a social handle check, and finally saying the name aloud to see whether it needs spelling. The web search kills most candidates in the first thirty seconds, so do it first.
No, and this is the most expensive misunderstanding in naming. A domain check asks the registry whether that exact string is registered. It says nothing about whether a live company already trades under that name on a different extension, holds a trademark on it, or has shipped an app with it. Those are the collisions that force a rename after launch, and all of them are free to check.
Searching is free and urgent; registering is expensive and usually not. Search before you commit, because discovering an existing mark later can force a rename. Registration runs roughly $1,000 per region for ten years, which is worth doing once you have a brand with real value attached. International agreements give you a priority window to extend protection to other regions after filing in the first.
Usually nothing legal, and a lot of commercial damage. Even with no trademark dispute, you split search results, reviews and word of mouth with a competitor, so every mention of the name benefits both of you. A team in r/SaaS this month described discovering at launch that four other products in their category shared their name, one of which had shipped six weeks earlier, and renamed rather than compete for their own name.
Generally not, or only weakly. Trademark rules require a mark to be distinctive rather than merely descriptive, which is why plainly descriptive names are hard to defend. This is one of the real arguments for an invented name: it is far easier to own. It is a trade against comprehension, and which side wins depends on your category.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). How to Check if a Startup Name Is Already Taken. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/how-to-check-if-a-startup-name-is-taken