Patent Maintenance Fees MCP server

@pipeworx/patent-maintenance-fees

Tell whether a US patent is still in force, or has lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees — the one question the patents pack cannot answer, because its prosecution-event data has no fee field at all.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1831+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

maintenance-fee event for one patent (payments, surcharges, expiration for non-payment, reinstatement, entity-status changes), a computed status, and a 4th/8th/12th-year fee-window breakdown (due date, grace-period end, whether paid). Design (D-prefixed) and plant (PP-prefixed) patents are statutorily exempt from maintenance fees and report subjecttomaintenance_fees:false instead of a bare no-match.

• getpatentmaintenancestatus(patentnumber) — every recorded

datefrom?, dateto?, limit?) — an exact totalmatching count first, then a capped, newest-first sample of the matching events. Useful for questions like "how many patents expired for non-payment last quarter" — pass eventcode: "EXP." and a date range.

• searchmaintenancefeeevents(eventcode?, patentnumberprefix?,

Auth

Keyless.

Data source

USPTO, Patent Maintenance Fee Events — the Open Data Portal's bulk-data product recording every maintenance-fee event for US patents granted 1981-09-01 to present. US federal data, public domain.

Why this is a local-copy pack, not a live proxy

Checked first, per CLAUDE.md's local-copy rule: the ODP's Patent File Wrapper search/get-by-number API — the one mcps/patents already calls — returns prosecution events (eventDataBag: filing, publication, grant, office actions) but has no maintenance-fee field at all. Maintenance-fee history is published only as the "PTMNFEE2" bulk product, a single weekly-cumulative file, with no per-patent query endpoint. The legacy keyless host this product used to publish from (bulkdata.uspto.gov) no longer resolves in DNS as of 2026-10-17, confirmed against two independent public resolvers (NXDOMAIN/NODATA, not a transient block) — the product is reachable today only through ODP's own authenticated bulk-data API, which answers every /api/v1/ path 401/403 without an API key (the same credential type as the patents pack's PLATFORMUSPTO_KEY). A bulk file with no per-record API is exactly the case CLAUDE.md's sourcing rule calls for a refreshed backing store rather than a per-call upstream fetch.

This pack reads a Supabase mirror (usptomaintenancefeeevents, schema in supabase/migrations/260usptomaintenancefeeevents.sql), loaded by scripts/ingest-uspto-maintenance-fees.mjs (.github/workflows/uspto-maintenance-fees-refresh.yml, dispatch-only — see below). Every response carries dataasof from the mirror's own loadedat.

Not yet provisioned (as of the commit that added this pack)

Two things still need to happen before usptomaintenancefee_events has any rows, and both are outside what a commit-only build session can do:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.