Brand Check

Brand Check

Vet candidate brand/product names end-to-end using pay-per-call APIs routed through taskfuel.ai. Sweep domain availability, check handle coverage, search the web for name collisions, and hit the US trademark register — then write the customer a clearance report. Every paid step goes through the taskfuel CLI (quote first, then pay).

Prerequisites

• taskfuel CLI connected (taskfuel whoami), balance ≥ ~$0.20 for a full ~10-candidate run.
• Base taskfuel skill covers payment mechanics — read it first if you haven't.

Workflow

1. Gather candidates

The user's ideas plus your own brainstorm (8–12 base names). taskfuel has no paid name-gen endpoint — brainstorm in-context.

2. Sweep domain availability

Announce the budget, then one WHOIS call per name × TLD across the TLDs the user cares about (default .com .io .dev .ai):

taskfuel call "https://2s.io/api/domain/whois?domain=acme.dev"   # $0.001

A 404 here means the domain is AVAILABLE, not that the call failed. The CLI prints error: gateway returned HTTP 404 in red, which reads like a broken endpoint — it isn't. No WHOIS/RDAP record exists because nobody has registered the name. An unregistered sweep therefore looks like a wall of red errors, and that is the good outcome. Read it as a result, not an outage.

data.items non-empty ⇒ taken (read .registrar.name and .expiresAt — flag domains expiring < ~120 days out as backorder candidates); items: [] or HTTP 404 ⇒ available.

Before concluding an endpoint is down, run one control with a value that must exist — google.com, web.dev, crates.io, anthropic.ai. If the control returns data, the endpoint is healthy and your 404 is a real negative. RDAP is verified working for .com .io .dev .ai .net .app (2026-07-30). Don't use ottoai/whois-lookup — it returns result: null false-negatives for registered domains; 2s.io/api/domain/whois is authoritative. Summarize the sweep as an availability matrix. Keep it ≤ ~15 name×TLD combos (one call each — no bulk endpoint) or ask before a larger run.

3. Shortlist 2–3 front-runners

With the user's priorities in mind, then in parallel per front-runner check handle coverage — a 404 means the handle is free:

taskfuel call "https://2s.io/api/github/user?username=acme"        # GitHub
taskfuel call "https://2s.io/api/news/hn-user?username=acme"       # Hacker News
taskfuel call "https://x402.twit.sh/users/by/username?username=acme" # X/Twitter, $0.005

4. Deep-dive the top pick

In parallel: full domain profile, a company check, and a web collision search:

taskfuel call "https://2s.io/api/domain/intel?domain=acme.ai"                  # DNS+WHOIS+rep
taskfuel call https://brave.mpp.paywithlocus.com/brave/web-search \
  --method POST --body '{"q":"acme","count":20}'                               # collisions, $0.035
taskfuel call "https://stableenrich.dev/api/companyenrich/org-enrich" --method POST --body '{"name":"Acme"}'

Two things to read in the Brave response beyond the hits themselves: data.query.altered — if the engine "corrected" your name to a real word, the name has essentially no web presence, which is a strong availability signal and a warning that people will mistype it — and a case-insensitive grep for the term across the raw response. If the only occurrence is the echoed query, the name is genuinely unused.

The web search surfaces existing products/companies already trading under the name — the highest-value finding the user can't see elsewhere.

5. Trademark

One full-text search on the core wordmark (add intlClass for the user's category if known); if it surfaces a live in-category mark, pull detail on that serial:

taskfuel call "https://2s.io/api/law/trademark-search?query=acme"           # US register
taskfuel call "https://2s.io/api/law/trademark-status?serial=NNNNNNNN"      # prosecution detail

6. Report — save it, don't just say it

Write the clearance report to ~/Documents/brand-checks/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<winner>.md and xdg-open it, then summarize the verdict in chat. Structure: YAML frontmatter (date, brief, candidates, winner, verdict, checks run, cost, degraded/skipped checks) followed by the customer-facing doc — one ✅/⚠️/❌ verdict section per name with the evidence in plain language, a ranked recommendation, then a "Do this now" list with urgency (register X today, claim handles, backorder expiring domains, lawyer only if a trademark hit lands in-category). No API mechanics in the body — costs live in the frontmatter and a one-line footer. Remind the customer availability is a live snapshot, not a reservation, and that the trademark search covers the US register only.

Run independent paid calls in parallel (single Bash block, background & + wait) — separate invoices, safe to parallelize. Save raw responses to the job tmp dir for the report.

Costs (observed 2026-07, quote to confirm)

A full ~10-candidate run lands around $0.10–0.20.