About IPFees

IPFees calculates official filing, examination, and renewal fees for PCT national and regional phase entry across 119 patent jurisdictions. More to the point of this page: it's a working demonstration of IPFLang, a statically-verified, currency-typed DSL for regulatory fee computation — running in a browser, not just described in a paper.

What it does

Pick jurisdictions, answer a short questionnaire, get a total — plus the full rule trace behind it, including the rules that didn't apply and why. Every fee schedule is a plain-text .ipf script, not logic buried in C#, and the underlying data is editable straight from the Explore menu above, against a database that resets every six hours.

Government fee schedules are legal text with real conditional structure: reduced rates for small entities, per-claim surcharges, examination fees that depend on how a search was handled. IPFLang keeps that as data a non-programmer can read and edit, while still giving you what a spreadsheet can't — proof the rules are complete, and a type system that catches currency mistakes before they reach a number.

Statically verified

A script can declare VERIFY COMPLETE or VERIFY MONOTONIC, checked on save. A schedule that fails either is refused, with the exact gap named.

Currency-safe

Every monetary literal carries its currency. Adding EUR to USD is a compile-time type error, not a runtime surprise.

Fully traceable

Every result ships with the complete rule trace — what fired, what didn't, and why. Nothing is a black box.

Open by default

Schedules, calculator, and API are all public, no key required — edit them yourself from the Explore menu.

How this relates to IPFLang

The language began inside this repository, then was pulled out with a formal grammar, a currency-aware type system, and static verification, and now ships separately as IPFLang. IPFees consumes it as a versioned package — it's the deployable layer around the engine: the web interface, the REST API, multi-currency conversion, and the 119-jurisdiction corpus. See the language reference and formal grammar for what the engine actually accepts.

Where this stands

This is research software from Politehnica University of Timișoara, not a commercial product — free, with no SLA. Dr. Robert Fichter of Jet IP verified calculations against official fee schedules across every implemented jurisdiction, to the dollar, and caught real discrepancies before this went live; that's the extent of external review so far, not a formal audit.

Both IPFees and IPFLang are open source under GPL-3.0 — fork either, or send a pull request for a jurisdiction that's missing. If you use this in research, citation metadata is in CITATION.cff, alongside the peer-reviewed article on IPFLang in the IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society.