How much does a naming agency cost?

Naming fees range from crowdsourced contests and $1,000 freelancers at the low end to multiple six-figure engagements at agencies.

Some of that variability comes from differences in expertise, experience, team size, and portfolio prestige. But a lot of it reflects scope. A $90,000 naming project is not just a $1,000 naming project done by fancier, more experienced people. Naming problems are not solved by names alone, so if you’re paying at the lower end of the spectrum, names are usually all you’re getting.

These are the main cost drivers that shape what you pay for and what you get:

A more useful comparison is cost against risk.

A forced rename after launch, or a name that legal rejects after months of work, costs far more than doing the work properly the first time. For companies with ongoing naming needs, the cost per name usually drops once a naming system is in place.

How long does a naming project take?

Most company and product naming projects take 6 to 8 weeks from kickoff to final decision, followed by full trademark clearance. TNG’s Naming Operating Systems work, which covers architecture, governance, and guidelines, typically takes three to six months.

The biggest variables are rarely creative. They are how quickly stakeholders can meet, how many feedback rounds are needed, and how early legal is involved. Projects move fastest when the decision-makers and the criteria are agreed on at the start, and TNG typically pushes hard for a go-slow-to-go-fast approach. We are meticulous in the first few weeks so that final decisioning feels like rolling downhill.

What does your naming process look like?

Every project starts with discovery: understanding the business, its audiences, its competitors, and its stakeholders.

From that, we build research-backed naming criteria and get them approved before any names are presented. Clients often rank the strategic thinking behind our criteria as the most valuable work in our naming engagements, and we have offerings built around just this part of our process.

We then present names in rounds, usually two, where every candidate is already pre-screened, and we collect structured feedback against the criteria. A shortlist goes through comprehensive legal, linguistic, and digital screening, including AI legibility, before a final decision.

The structure is designed so that decision-makers choose against agreed criteria rather than first impressions or unhelpful, biased instincts.

Do you need experience in our industry to name our company or product?

Naming is a specialization of its own that doesn’t belong to any one vertical. Namers from outside a category often find territory that people inside it have stopped noticing, because insiders tend to reach for the same vocabulary as their competitors. When working on a fintech product, for example, we make sure to have brains in the room with zero fintech experience.

Naming thrives on diversified thinking and cross-conceptual, almost synaesthetic expression.

What matters is a disciplined understanding of your business, customers, competitors, and the trademark landscape in your category, which is what discovery is for. We have named credit cards, cars, sneakers, and AI agents, and approaches that work in one category consistently sharpen the thinking in another. Our processes and methodologies, from linguistic analysis and trademark strategy to global cultural screening and name decisioning structures, are category-agnostic.

It’s also worth noting that naming agencies with a portfolio of extended enterprise engagements, like TNG, couldn’t function if we were limited to one or two verticals. Corporate non-compete terms often mean we can work with only one client in a given category every year or two.

Do we need the exact-match .com?

Owning the exact-match .com is convenient, and if it’s available and in budget, go for it. But it is rarely worth giving up a stronger name to get one. Many well-known companies operate without theirs:

Customers find companies through search, apps, and increasingly AI assistants, not by guessing URLs. We have named startups that launched without the exact-match .com and acquired it later, after the brand helped them achieve massive success.

The domain is one factor in a naming decision, alongside long-term extensibility, brand strategy, legal risk, and linguistic and cultural fit, and it should be weighted accordingly. When the exact match isn’t available, common solutions include adding a modifier or category word, or using a different top-level domain.

TNG’s default approach is to treat it as a nice-to-have, not a necessity. We want to hear a practical argument, grounded in marketing strategy, for why your brand needs the exact-match .com before making it a higher priority and screening for it earlier in the process. Occasionally, a business’s funnel would take a hit without it; typically, it wouldn’t once we actually game out the operation.

Do you use AI in your naming process?

AI is useful for generating volume, surfacing associations a team might take weeks to find, and flagging conflicts early. We also use it to assess how candidate names are likely to behave in AI-mediated search and recommendations.

AI cannot set priorities among competing criteria, apply strategy to a specific portfolio, or manage the human bias and politics that decide whether a name gets chosen. Those decisions stay with experienced people.

As for whether we use AI for creative: yeah, why wouldn’t we? But not exclusively. Namers have always used a wide assortment of reference tools, corpus analytics, semantic frameworks, and advanced search models to surface possible solutions to naming puzzles. Frankly, LLMs are just better reference tools. They can help you discover creative options, but they generally suck at telling you whether those options are any good.

Can’t we just generate names ourselves with AI?

Anyone can produce a thousand candidates in an afternoon.

But generating names was never the hard part.

The hard part is deciding which name is right for the business, confirming it can be owned, and getting the people who have to approve it to agree. AI tools don’t do that work. Teams that rely on them often end up with long lists, no agreed way to choose among them, and shortlists full of the same conventions their competitors used. And frankly, it takes real expertise to get LLMs to deliver accurate, relevant linguistic analysis at the level TNG and other high-quality naming agencies provide.

AI is most useful once good naming criteria exist. A model given clear, well-designed naming guidelines produces far better candidates than one given a vague prompt, and writing those guidelines is expert work.

Can AI replace trademark screening?

Come ask again in five years.

AI and search tools can speed up preliminary screening, but trademark clearance still requires the judgment of a qualified trademark attorney, who weighs likelihood of confusion, the strength of existing marks, and the company’s tolerance for risk. Trademark judgments often rest more on odd precedents and unspoken cultural norms than on simple plug-and-play rules, so intuition born of experience is still necessary to make educated guesses about how a trademark office will view any given case.

At TNG, we screen candidates throughout name development so weak options are removed early, and we work alongside our clients’ counsel on full clearance.

How do you get a leadership team to agree on a name?

Then define who decides before the process starts, and structure feedback so it is measured against those criteria rather than personal taste.

New names rarely feel right on first exposure, because familiarity is a large part of why any name feels right. Our process is built to separate a name’s potential from the room’s first reaction.

Beyond process, our experience and expertise help us close the discussion loops that often spin out leadership and stall naming projects.

We often succeed through the conversations we end rather than the ones we start.

That means providing reassurance, separating real concerns from subjective obstacles, and being clear about what is logically and linguistically possible.

Do you work with startups as well as large companies?

We’ll name your kid for the right price (again, our naming process is category-agnostic).

We work with funded startups naming or renaming the company and its first products, and with Fortune 50 enterprises renaming companies and building naming systems for large portfolios.

Our enterprise work shapes the advice we give startups: we have seen what happens to names, and to the companies behind them, ten years after launch, and we help founders choose names that will still work as the business grows.