Costs and timeframes

How much does it cost to patent an invention?

Contrary to popular belief, few inventions are easy to describe (in writing) and it is never easy to draft a patent application…
Even an invention that seems very easy to understand may require pages of description and complex claim wording…

Your patent expert may be highly experienced, but it will still take hours of work and a great deal of effort to draft a satisfactory description of your invention and, above all, claims that ‘hold up’…
As a result, it is unlikely that you will walk away with less than €3,500, a figure that can rise rapidly if your invention is complex…

By way of example, we find the following amounts for France:

3500 – 5000 euros on the following Express website (dated 2008!, in the article « Combien coûte un brevet ? ») (How much does a patent cost?)
5000 euros in the French magazine L’Entreprise, dated September 2013.

For Switzerland, these figures should be increased slightly to take account of the country’s higher standard of living.

The easiest way is still to ask for a quote!

Patent publication

And to save yourself unnecessary expense, you can carry out a free keyword search yourself, to see if your invention is a priori new, on patent publication sites such as :

Drafting the patent application

Finally, drafting a patent application is a time-consuming activity.
In general, it takes about two to three weeks from the time you present your invention to one of our patent attorneys until you receive a draft patent application…

Of course, in the event of an emergency, such as an imminent disclosure of your invention (trade fair, exhibition, scientific publication, etc.), we will do everything in our power to avoid a catastrophe (loss of all your rights to the invention if a patent application is not filed in time).