The $3,862 question.
Every patent owner gets the letter. At 3½, 7½, and 11½ years, the Patent Office asks whether your patent is still worth keeping — and the fee rises each time. Whether you hold one patent or a thousand, the question is identical: is this asset worth its next check? Here is how one of our founders answered it, with evidence, in a morning.
Ideas are not free to keep. Patent owners face a steady march of decisions about how much more time and money to put into what they have built — file the continuation or not, broaden or not, enforce or not — and, on a schedule set by the Patent Office, pay the maintenance fee or let the patent go. The 11½-year fee is the last and the largest. Pay it, and you buy the patent's remaining years. Skip it, and the patent is abandoned, permanently. Most owners decide on instinct, because the honest analysis has always cost more than the fee.
“If the maintenance fee is not paid, the patent will be abandoned.”
THE LETTER EVERY PATENT OWNER KNOWS — RECREATED; IDENTIFYING DETAILS REMOVED.
THE OWNER. Gary Shuster is a named inventor on more than 262 U.S. patents. Reminders like this one arrive for him constantly, and at portfolio scale “pay it to be safe” stops being caution and becomes a budget line with no analysis behind it. What he needed is what a one-patent inventor needs: a fast, accurate read on whether this patent earns its keep.
“Is it worth $3,862 to maintain? I turned to Inventiply for help.”
— Gary Shuster
The report did what a score cannot: it named its assumptions. The $75,000 center rests on a reconstructed candidate-revenue base of about $1.21 million, a 2% feature-level royalty, 30% adoption, and a stated present-value factor — then adds documented family breadth and a family halo, with each layer's dependence stated. And it said why the center held at $75,000 rather than higher: limited candidate-revenue evidence and unresolved claim-element gaps. The gaps were named, not papered over.
“Likely value: $75,000. Now consider that a broker would take half, so more like $37,500. Now consider the cost of enforcement if people don't pay, and we're underwater. So it points to not paying.”
— Gary Shuster, the morning the reminder arrived
THE TURN. The same file could have said pay. Evidence of real adoption — the $350,000 and $1,000,000 scenarios — would have flipped the answer, and the report names the evidence that kept those scenarios out of reach: candidate-revenue proof and unresolved claim-element gaps. That is the difference between a valuation with its assumptions showing and a score. The file did not tell Gary what to feel about his patent. It told him what the evidence supports and what it does not. He drew the conclusion himself.
One patent or a thousand, the question is the same — only the number of times you must answer it changes. The maintenance-fee decision is where patent value stops being talk and becomes next quarter's check. Before the next reminder reaches your inbox, know what the asset earns.
This case study describes a founder's decision about his own patent, informed by an Inventiply analysis. It is not legal advice, and it is not a prediction about your patent's value — every Inventiply valuation arrives as a band with its assumptions stated. Where formal legal work is required, that is a separate engagement through DeepLaw LLP or your own counsel.