The brief
Naming a business is the one decision founders make early, alone, and largely by vibe. The registers that would tell them whether the name is available are public, but they are five different systems and none of them talk to each other.
NameStake is ours. We built it partly because the tool should exist and partly because a product you run yourself is a more honest demonstration of how you build than a portfolio of other people’s work.
What it does
One search runs five checks: the ASIC business names register, the Australian Business Register, IP Australia trade marks, domain availability across the common Australian endings, and how crowded the phrase already is in search.
Then it scores the name out of 100, from two halves kept deliberately apart. Brand quality is how the name reads and sounds. Availability is whether you can actually have it. They are separated because they fail differently: a beautiful name that is already registered is worth nothing, so an exact register match caps the score no matter how well it reads.
Saying so when it does not know
The part worth pointing at is what happens when a check fails. Any one of those sources can be slow or down, and part of the score comes from a language model assessing how ownable a name feels, which is not always available either.
When something is missing the report says so and reweights the rest. It never quietly scores you differently and presents it as the same number. Results are labelled as indicative signals rather than legal advice, because that is what they are.
Built to stay out of the way
Astro, on Azure, with the ASIC dataset refreshed weekly from data.gov.au. Free to use, nothing to buy, no account to create.