Startup Name Availability Checker

A startup name is a company name before it is a product name

The other name checks ask whether a product, an app or a package is using this name. This one asks something narrower and, at the beginning, more consequential: is another company already operating under it. That is the conflict that reaches your incorporation paperwork, your bank account, your first investor conversation and eventually a lawyer.

The answer is spread across places that do not talk to each other — the domain, the code namespace, the company page where their employees list themselves, and the funding databases journalists search. This tool takes one pass across all of them.

What this startup name checker actually checks

Five sources, and they do not all work the same way. Three run live the moment you press check. The other two are databases that block automated requests, so this tool builds you a pre-filled link and you confirm with one click. That distinction is stated on every card rather than hidden behind a spinner.

• —Domains — .com, .net and .ai, queried live against the registries
• —GitHub — queried live: whether the organisation handle exists, and separately whether a user holds it
• —LinkedIn — queried live: does a company page already answer to this name
• —Crunchbase — one-click verify: is a funded company already operating under it
• —Product Hunt — one-click verify: has a product already launched under the slug

Why two of these need a click

Crunchbase and Product Hunt both refuse automated requests — they return a block page for every lookup, whether the name is taken or free. A tool that queried them anyway would show you a spinner followed by two failures, every single time, and dress that up as a result.

So this tool does not pretend. It builds the exact URL and hands it to you, and the check takes about five seconds each. There is a genuine upside: a human glance at a company page tells you things a status code cannot — whether the company is in your market, whether it still exists, whether it is a two-person side project or a competitor with two hundred employees. That judgement is the part that actually decides whether a name collision matters.

A clear result is not proof that no company exists

None of these five sources is a company register. A business can trade under a name for years without a LinkedIn page, without funding, and without anybody registering the matching .com — sole traders and small companies do it constantly, and they still hold rights that can be enforced against you.

Company registration is also national. A clear result here says nothing about what is on file at Companies House, the Delaware Division of Corporations, or any of the other registers that would actually govern your incorporation. If you are about to file, search the register you are filing in.

Available is not cleared

Everything here answers one question: has somebody already claimed this? That is not the same question as whether you are allowed to use it. Trademark rights attach to a mark within a class of goods and services, on registers this tool does not search — so a name can come back clear everywhere above and still belong to somebody else in your category.

The order that saves money is: screen for occupancy first, because it is fast and free and eliminates most candidates; then run a trademark search on the two or three that survive; then register the domain and reserve the handles the same day. Renaming after incorporation means new filings, new contracts, new bank details and a rebuild of everything that pointed at the old name.