We sell brand protection, so take this with that in mind. We'll make the case for doing it yourself as fairly as we can, because for a lot of brands it's the right answer, and a customer who signs up too early cancels.
What follows is a way to work out what each option costs you, using your own numbers rather than ours.
What "brand protection" involves
Whoever does the work, it's the same four jobs:
- Find. Search marketplaces, search engines, social platforms and domain registrations for your brand. (The manual playbook.)
- Judge. Decide which results are real problems. Your authorised reseller, a review blog and press coverage all mention your brand, and none of them is an infringement. Getting this wrong is the costly mistake.
- Enforce. Capture evidence, choose the right channel and notice, file it, and follow up.
- Repeat. Do it again next week and compare, because sellers relist. (Why counterfeiters relist.)
The first and fourth jobs are mechanical. The second and third need judgement. In practice, the cost of brand protection is mostly the cost of the judgement.
The cost of doing it yourself
DIY has no invoice, but it isn't free. Its cost is time, and you can estimate it.
Time a full pass once, then plug in your numbers:
| Task | Your estimate |
|---|---|
| Running your search set across the platforms you care about | ___ min / week |
| Reviewing results and comparing against last week | ___ min / week |
| Capturing evidence per finding (what to capture) | ___ min × findings |
| Filing and following up per notice | ___ min × notices |
Multiply the total by the loaded hourly cost of whoever does it. If that's a founder or a head of marketing, it isn't cheap.
For a sense of scale: our own team budgets roughly 15 minutes of human review per notice, and that's with search, comparison and evidence capture already automated. That figure is only the judgement and filing. If you're also doing everything else by hand, assume more.
Three costs don't show up in a timesheet:
- Inconsistency. The weekly pass is the first thing dropped in a busy week, and infringement doesn't take weeks off. Gaps let listings collect sales and reviews before you see them.
- Missed coverage. Manual search stops after the first page or two of results. The second page of a marketplace search, or a store reached only by a "brand + replica" query, may never get looked at.
- No memory. Without a log, a relisting looks like a new problem, and you lose the repeat-infringer argument that gets accounts closed.
When DIY is enough
Do it yourself if most of these describe you:
- A search pass turns up a handful of findings, mostly on one or two marketplaces.
- The findings are clear-cut: your name, your photos, "replica" in the title.
- Someone on the team can reliably protect an hour or two a week for it.
- You don't have a phishing or impersonation problem putting customers' money or accounts at risk, where speed matters more than cost.
- Your registered trademarks are in place, so the platform programs are available to you directly.
If that's you, use the playbooks on this blog, keep a spreadsheet, and come back to the question in six months. The marketplaces' own brand-owner programs are free and work well for a brand in this position.
When DIY stops working
These are the signs that the time cost has passed the cost of help:
- The weekly pass keeps getting skipped, and you keep finding listings that have clearly been up for months.
- Findings run to dozens, and comparing against last week no longer fits in a spreadsheet.
- You're seeing several categories at once: counterfeits, plus lookalike domains, plus fake support accounts. Each has its own channels and its own learning curve.
- The same sellers keep coming back and you need to show a pattern to get them closed.
- A domain needs escalation to a UDRP or a lawyer, and nobody in-house has done one.
The options for outside help
Roughly three kinds, each with real trade-offs:
A law firm. The right choice for litigation, customs recordals, and disputes with real money at stake. Billing is usually hourly, which suits high-stakes work and doesn't suit filing the same marketplace form forty times.
An enterprise brand-protection vendor. Broad coverage, dedicated account teams, often built for very large brands. Many don't publish prices and work on annual contracts. Worth asking for a quote if your volume is very large.
A monitoring and enforcement service — what we build. Automated search and comparison, with humans reviewing every notice before it's filed. Here is our pricing in full, so you can compare it with the DIY estimate above:
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free scan | $0 | One scan, findings with quoted evidence. No account. |
| Monitor | $149/mo | Weekly rescans, alerts on new findings only, full evidence. Enforcements $195 each. |
| Protect | $599/mo | Daily rescans, 10 enforcements a month included, then $85 each. Removals tracked to resolution. |
| Managed | $2,500/mo | 50 enforcements a month, reviewed and filed by our team, escalation support for UDRP and counsel. |
Annual billing on any plan is ten months' price for twelve.
Two things about the structure, because they're the honest version of the trade-off:
- Enforcements are metered, not unlimited. Every notice we file is reviewed by a person, because a takedown notice filed without the right to file it creates real legal exposure for the filer. Human review costs money per notice. An "unlimited" plan would either lose us money or tempt us to skip the review, and we won't do either.
- We verify you own or represent the mark before filing anything. That adds a step at the start. It's the same step a careful in-house team would take.
Doing the arithmetic
Put your DIY estimate next to the tier that matches your volume:
- If your honest weekly time costs less than $149 a month and you're keeping up, stay DIY. Monitoring alone wouldn't buy you much.
- If you're keeping up with enforcement but losing track of what's new, Monitor covers the find-and-compare part and leaves filing to you.
- If you're filing more than a handful of notices a month, compare the time cost of those notices with Protect. Ten included enforcements works out at about $60 per notice, against $195 for a single one, so at more than three a month the plan costs less than paying per notice.
- If enforcement is taking a large part of someone's week, compare Managed with that person's time, not with zero.
And if you aren't sure what volume you have, which is most people before they've looked properly, find that out first. It costs nothing.
Find out how much there is before deciding how to handle it. A free Defenex scan shows what's out there, with quoted evidence for every finding, in about 90 seconds and with no account. If it's a handful, the guides on this blog will get you through it. If it isn't, pricing is one click away.