Every week a few thousand US patents lapse early because the owner stopped paying the maintenance fees. Once that happens, the invention is free for anyone to make. The USPTO publishes all of it, but it’s buried in a 1.6 GB data file that almost nobody reads. So I built Fresh Off Patent. Every Wednesday it: pulls the week’s new lapses from the USPTO data (4,249 in the latest batch) filters them to things people buy, plus software, medical devices, robotics and a few other fields llm summarizes up each one: what it covered, how hard it’d be to make, what similar products sell for ranks them with a score out of 100 Some of what turns up is surprising. In August, Google let one of its robotics patents lapse. Stack: Python, the USPTO Open Data Portal, MongoDB, FastAPI, and about $0.45 a week of OpenAI. It all runs in GitHub Actions every Wednesday. There’s a free tier: https://freshoffpatent.com I’m looking for my first subscribers and honest feedback. What would make this useful to you?   submitted by   /u/kyleranns [link]   [comments]