How much does naming a startup actually cost? Agency vs contest vs AI vs DIY

Naming a startup can cost anywhere from nothing to well into six figures. Do it yourself over a weekend and the invoice is $0; hire a top-tier naming agency and a single engagement commonly runs $75,000–$150,000, occasionally more. Between those poles sit naming contests (roughly $300–$1,500) and AI generators (free to a few dollars). But the four approaches aren’t really competing on price — they’re trading money against speed, expertise, and how much trademark and availability risk you carry yourself. An agency sells you a de-risked shortlist and a defensible process; DIY hands you the whole risk for free; contests and AI tools split the difference. Below: honest ranges for all four — almost nothing here has a fixed price — plus the two hidden costs that arrive whichever route you take. If you want the process rather than the price tags, start with how to name a startup.

What does a naming agency cost?

Agency pricing is quote-based and spans well over an order of magnitude, so distrust any single “average.” The realistic bands:

• Freelance and boutique consultants: naming-only engagements can range from the low single thousands to around $20,000, depending on scope and seniority.
• Mid-market agencies: roughly $35,000–$75,000, typically over six to ten weeks.
• Top-tier firms: commonly starting around $75,000 and running to $150,000+, occasionally into the hundreds of thousands for global, multi-market projects — and always custom-quoted; the biggest names publish no pricing at all. Lexicon Branding (Pentium, BlackBerry, Swiffer) is the rare firm with independently reported figures, averaging around $75,000–$150,000 per project.

What does the money buy? Not a name — a process: strategic and competitive research, a naming brief with agreed criteria, on the order of a hundred candidates (Lexicon reportedly develops around 100 per project), linguistic screening across the markets you’ll sell in, preliminary trademark screening so obviously conflicted names never reach you, and written rationale for the finalists. Expect several weeks to a few months.

One caveat before signing: full legal trademark clearance is usually outside scope — the agency’s screening is a filter, not a legal opinion, and the attorney-grade search is a separate bill. Worth it? For a name going on packaging in twelve languages, plausibly. For a pre-revenue SaaS, almost certainly overkill.

What about a naming contest?

Contest platforms crowdsource the generation step: you post a brief, hundreds of people submit names, you pick a winner. Atom (formerly Squadhelp) is the best-known example of the category, and its published tiers are a fair proxy for what crowdsourcing costs — roughly $300 to $1,500, from a Bronze contest around $299 up to a managed, agency-style package around $1,499, winner’s prize money bundled in.

The pitch is genuine: hundreds of submissions from human namers, typically inside days to a couple of weeks, for a small fraction of any agency fee. Ownership is cleaner than people assume — under the platform’s IP transfer agreement, all rights in the winning name are formally assigned to you once the winner is paid. Contractual, not a handshake.

Two caveats keep the price honest:

• Quality is variable, and it correlates with the tier. The platform reserves its top-rated creatives for higher packages; cheaper contests draw a broader, noisier pool, and sifting hundreds of mixed-quality entries is still your job.
• The matching domain is often not included. If the winning name’s exact domain sits in the platform’s marketplace, buying it is a separate — sometimes substantial — transaction. Budget name and domain as two line items, not one.

Can an AI generator just do it for free?

For the generation step, essentially yes. AI name generators run from completely free — Namelix is the standard example — to a few dollars, and they’ll produce more candidates in an afternoon than a contest yields in two weeks. We’ve mapped the category in best AI domain name generators in 2026 and the business-model split in free vs paid domain name generators; the short version is that raw generation has become nearly free.

The caveat is the category’s defining one: AI generators are creative tools, not legal tools. Some query domain registries in real time; others simply invent plausible word-blends with no availability check at all — and trademark screening is generally absent either way. Treat any “available” label as unverified until you’ve confirmed it yourself.

Full disclosure: Domain Yoga sits in this category, and its design responds to that caveat — every suggestion is checked for live availability before you see it, ranked by brandability (scoring documented in our methodology), and priced per search at a few dollars ($2–$5 depending on volume), not as a subscription. The same honesty applies to us as to everyone else here: no AI tool replaces trademark screening. Verify separately, always.

Isn’t DIY just free?

The headline cost is $0; the real cost is your time plus every risk a paid route would have absorbed. Time first: done properly, DIY means brainstorming, shortlists, availability checks, and feedback rounds across weeks of founder attention — a real opportunity cost, even when it’s fun. Risk second: with DIY, you are the screening department. Nobody linguistically checked your name, nobody ran a preliminary trademark screen, and nobody verified the domain before you fell in love with it. All of it is doable yourself — run your shortlist through how to test a name before committing and the collision checks in trademark basics before you register — but it only counts if you actually do it.

The risk itself doesn’t reduce to a number — it’s exposure, not a line item. But the tail is well documented: if a DIY name later collides with an existing trademark, a full forced rebrand — new name, logo, domain, SEO, filings, customer communication — is commonly estimated at $10,000–$50,000 or more depending on company size. Which reframes the headline price nicely: DIY is free only if nothing goes wrong.

What’s the hidden cost every route shares?

Two costs sit outside all four price tags: the domain and the trademark.

The domain is the uncapped line item. No approach hands it to you by default — agencies deliver names, contests often exclude the matching domain, AI tools and DIY leave acquisition to you. Typical brandable domains trade in the aftermarket for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars — manageable, if annoying. But the ceiling is genuinely open: AI.com sold for a reported $70 million in February 2026, the largest domain sale on record. An extreme outlier, not a budget line — but proof that “we’ll just buy the domain later” is a plan with no upper bound. If your chosen name’s domain is taken, how to buy a taken domain covers the realistic playbook; checking availability during generation rather than after is the cheaper fix.

The trademark comes after the name, whoever found it. Registering typically costs a few hundred dollars per class in filing fees, more with an attorney, plus renewal fees later — the full breakdown, and whether you need to register at all, is in do you need to register a trademark. The practical point: whichever route you take, screening before you commit is cheap insurance against the five-figure rebrand above.

So which should you choose?

Match the spend to what the name has to do right now:

• DIY or an AI generator if you’re pre-validation or budget-constrained. The name’s job right now is to not embarrass you while you find out whether anyone wants the product. Spend dollars, not thousands, and keep your energy for the build.
• A contest if you want a wide net of human ideas without agency money. A few hundred dollars buys hundreds of candidates and clean IP assignment. Expect to sift, and budget the domain separately.
• An agency when the name must carry real weight and you can fund it. Multi-market launch, physical packaging, a category you intend to define for a decade — that’s where strategy, linguistics, and professional screening earn a five- or six-figure fee.

Whatever you pick, the constants don’t move: verify the domain, screen the trademark, and treat every name as provisional until both come back clean. And if you’re at the DIY-and-AI end of the spectrum, Domain Yoga is built for exactly that stage — around 250 availability-checked, brandability-ranked names for a few dollars a search. It won’t cover the domain or the trademark, but the generation step, at least, doesn’t have to cost more than lunch.