How to Name Your Software Business: Name, Domain and Logo

The name of a software business is the one marketing asset you cannot change cheaply later. It has to be sayable, spellable, available as a domain you can afford, clear of existing trademarks, and free on the social handles and package registries your customers will look for. This guide walks through generating candidates, testing them, clearing them legally, locking down the domain, and getting a logo that will still work in five years.

Decide what kind of name you are choosing

Software names fall into four buckets, and the right one depends on how much marketing budget you have to attach meaning to the word.

Type	Examples	Upside	Downside
Descriptive	Easy Digital Downloads, WP Rocket, Seriously Simple Podcasting	Explains itself, ranks for the category, easy to trademark-clear as a whole	Hard to trademark the descriptive part, boxes you in if the product expands
Suggestive	Slack, Stripe, Notion, BuddyPress	Hints at the benefit, memorable, still distinctive enough to protect	Takes a little explaining on day one
Coined	Zapier, Trello, Kinsta	Unique, domains and trademarks usually available	Zero built-in meaning; you pay to create it
Compound or portmanteau	WooCommerce, LearnDash, Instagram	Readable, searchable, often available	Easy to get wrong (awkward syllables, unintended words)

For a bootstrapped product, suggestive or compound names are the sweet spot. You get some meaning for free and you can still own the word. We have named most of our own products this way: Learnomy, Eventonomy, Jetonomy all signal the category and share a family suffix, which makes the next product easier to name and easier to recognise as ours. Purely descriptive names are fine for a single plugin, but they are hard to defend and a competitor can sit one letter away.

Generate more candidates than feels necessary

Aim for 50 to 100 raw candidates before you judge any of them. Most will die in the checks below, and you want survivors you actually like, not the only one left standing.

1. Write down 20 words connected to what the product does, who it is for, and how it feels to use (speed, calm, control, growth).
2. Write down 10 words from an unrelated domain you can borrow a metaphor from: sailing, weather, architecture, music, cooking.
3. Combine: prefix plus root, root plus suffix, two roots, truncated words, foreign-language equivalents, misspellings that are still pronounceable.
4. Use an AI assistant to widen the list, but give it your constraints (two syllables, starts with a hard consonant, ends in a vowel) rather than asking for “a cool name”. It is good at volume and bad at taste.
5. Say each one aloud, and in a sentence: “I use ___ for my course site.” Names that only work in a logo fail here.

Then apply hard filters: under three syllables, no ambiguous spellings (is it Lyft or Lift?), no hyphens, no numbers, nothing that requires explaining the pronunciation, and nothing that collides with a common word in your customers’ languages. Check the top five candidates in a quick Google search and a translation tool; more than one startup has named itself something rude in Portuguese.

Test the shortlist with people who are not you

Founders fall in love with names. Customers do not care. Run three cheap tests on the last five to eight candidates:

• The phone test. Call someone and say the name once. Ask them to text it back. If fewer than four out of five spell it correctly, cut it.
• The recall test. Show a group the list for ten seconds, then ask which names they remember a day later. Distinctive beats clever.
• The association test. Ask “what do you think a company called ___ sells?” You want answers in your neighbourhood. If a project management tool’s name makes people think of pet food, move on.

Ten people is enough to catch the obvious failures. You are not looking for consensus, you are looking for the absence of problems.

Clear the trademark before you buy anything

A domain purchase does not give you any rights to a name. A registered trademark held by someone else in your class of goods does, and they can force you to rebrand after you have printed the T-shirts. Do the clearance work before you spend money.

1. Search the USPTO Trademark Search (the system that replaced TESS at the end of 2023). Search the exact name, then phonetic and spelling variants, in Class 9 (downloadable software) and Class 42 (software as a service). A similar-sounding mark for similar goods is a “likelihood of confusion” problem even if the spelling differs.
2. If you sell outside the US, check the EUIPO’s eSearch plus, the UK IPO register, and WIPO’s Global Brand Database. One search does not cover all of them.
3. Search state business registries and Companies House for operating businesses with the same name. Unregistered (common law) rights exist in many jurisdictions.
4. Search the WordPress.org plugin and theme directories, npm, PyPI, Packagist and the Chrome Web Store if your product touches those ecosystems. A name collision there will not be a legal problem, but it will be a support-ticket problem forever.

If the name survives, consider filing. In the US the base application fee is $350 per class as of January 2025 (the older TEAS Plus and Standard tiers were merged), with a $200 surcharge per class if you write a custom description of goods instead of picking from the USPTO’s ID Manual. Two classes, filed yourself with pre-approved descriptions, is therefore $700. A trademark attorney will add roughly $500 to $1,500 for a proper clearance opinion and the filing, and for a name you intend to build a company on, that is money well spent. The USPTO’s fee summary lists the current schedule.

Choose the domain with your eyes open

The .com is still the default people type, and for a product that sells to businesses it is still worth stretching for. But the rules have changed enough that a hard “must be .com” policy will cost you good names.

Extension	Typical renewal (2026)	Good for	Watch out for
.com	$12 to $16 at most registrars; wholesale rises 7% to $10.97 in November 2026, with further annual increases allowed through 2029	Anything customer-facing	Almost every good word is taken; aftermarket prices run from hundreds to six figures
.io	$45 to $60, after a registry increase in January 2026	Developer tools, APIs	Renewals cost three to five times .com; a January 2026 registry price rise caught many owners off guard
.ai	$60 to $100	AI products	Premium pricing on short names, two-year minimum at many registrars
.app / .dev	$15 to $20	Apps, developer products	HTTPS is mandatory (fine for you, but know it)
.co / .so / .sh	$25 to $45	Fallbacks	.co gets typo traffic to the .com owner

Practical rules we follow: register the exact-match .com if it is available or affordable, and at least the .co or .io of the same name as a defensive hold. If the exact .com is gone, a short prefix (get-, try-, use-) or a category suffix (-app, -hq) is acceptable for a SaaS; a long descriptive domain is not. Check the domain’s history on the Wayback Machine and in a backlink tool before buying on the aftermarket; expired domains with a spam history carry penalties with them.

Buy at a registrar that does not hold your domain hostage: transparent renewal pricing, free WHOIS privacy, two-factor authentication on the account, and easy DNS export. Turn on auto-renew and registrar lock the day you buy. Use a company email address for the registrant contact, not a founder’s personal one.

Lock down handles and listings in the same hour

Once the trademark search is clean and the domain is bought, grab the handles before you announce anything. X, LinkedIn company page, YouTube, Instagram, GitHub organisation, and the WordPress.org username if you will publish plugins. Tools like Namechk show availability across dozens of platforms in one screen. Consistency matters more than perfection: if @yourname is taken on one platform, use the same fallback (@yournameHQ) everywhere rather than a different variant on each.

Set up a Google Business Profile and a Crunchbase entry if you are raising money, and register the name as a business entity in your jurisdiction. Each of these is a small moat against someone else squatting on your brand later.

Get a logo that works at 16 pixels

The logo is the last step, not the first, because it depends on the name’s length, letterforms and the domain you landed on. For software, the logo will spend most of its life as a favicon, a browser tab, an app icon and a tiny avatar. Design for that size and scale up, not the other way round.

• Wordmark plus a simple mark. The wordmark carries the name on the website; the mark carries it everywhere the name does not fit. Both should work in one colour.
• Test at 16, 32 and 64 pixels before you approve anything. If the mark becomes a blob, simplify it.
• Avoid trends. Gradients, 3D and the “friendly geometric blob” look date quickly. Flat, high-contrast and a little idiosyncratic lasts.
• Get the files. SVG master, PNG exports at 1x and 2x, a monochrome version, and the font names. Make sure the contract assigns copyright to you.

Budget: a solid logo from an experienced freelancer runs $500 to $3,000. Contest sites are cheaper and the results show it, mostly because no one on a contest site does the research step. AI logo generators are fine for a placeholder while you validate the product, and nothing more. When the logo is done, fold it into a proper brand system; our guide on building a brand identity that stands out covers colour, type and how to keep it consistent across a WordPress site.

A worked example

Say you are building a scheduling tool for online course creators. Category words: schedule, cohort, calendar, session, enrol. Metaphor domain: tides and seasons. Candidates: Cohortly, Tidetable, Sessio, Enrolla, Termwise. Phone test kills Sessio (is it Sesso? Sessyo?). Trademark search on Cohortly finds a live Class 42 registration for a similar name in education software, so it goes. Termwise.com is available for a reasonable aftermarket price, Tidetable.com is parked at five figures. Handles for @termwise are open on three of four platforms. Termwise wins, not because it was the favourite, but because it was the one that survived every check. That is how this process usually ends, and it is the right way for it to end.

Frequently asked questions

Should the company name and the product name be the same?

For a first product, yes. One name is cheaper to build and easier to remember. Split them later if you launch a second product that needs its own identity; plenty of companies (Automattic and WooCommerce, for instance) run a house name over product brands.

Is a .io domain still a good idea for a software company?

It is acceptable for developer-facing tools, but renewals now cost three to five times a .com and the registry raised prices again in January 2026. If your customers are non-technical, prefer .com.app or .co.

Do I need a trademark before launch?

You need a clearance search before launch. Filing can follow once the product has traction, though in first-to-file countries (most of the EU, China) delaying is riskier than in the US.

Can I rename later if I get it wrong?

Yes, and companies do, but it costs domain authority, backlinks, brand recall and several weeks of work. Treat a rename as a last resort and do the checks above properly the first time.

Where to start

Block out a week. Days one and two for candidates and filters, day three for the phone and recall tests, day four for trademark and domain searches on the survivors, day five to buy the domain, register the handles and brief a designer. If you want help with the website once the name is settled, our development team builds product sites and SaaS marketing pages on WordPress and Astro and can take the brand system straight into the theme.