But some companies evolve on top of their patents and use them to obtain a competitive moat over a period of time to outcompete larger players. If the patents w

But some companies evolve on top of their patents and use them to obtain a competitive moat over a period of time to outcompete larger players. If the patents were available for a flat license fee, you’d penalize patent innovation by smaller entities as bigger entities could pay the flat license fee and copy the patent. So smaller players will either just keep it a trade secret and hope that no one finds out (which theoretically hurts society due to lack of published secrets) or have to hope they can monetize their patent super fast & find someone with really deep pockets to fund that work. And as mentioned, patents are super expensive. From talking to some people it varies significantly depending on your details but probably starting is ~10-20k per patent.