The cost is much higher than the filing fee. You should usually plan to spend about $20k to hire a patent attorney to help get a patent filed. If you are doing

The cost is much higher than the filing fee. You should usually plan to spend about $20k to hire a patent attorney to help get a patent filed. If you are doing this yourself you can keep the cost much lower, and try to do all of the work yourself, but a company usually spends tens of thousands of dollars getting a patent filed. At Boston University they have an office of about 5 people that evaluates university generated IP to see if it is worth patenting and if their market research doesn't show that it is worth $50k over the next few years they won't bother.