How SmartName works

You choose a plan and pay

Pick Light, Standard or Premium on the pricing page. Payment is taken at checkout by Paddle, using a card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay. One payment buys one delivery; there is no subscription and nothing to cancel later.

You can order as a guest. If you create a free member account, every delivery is kept in your My page, and later orders automatically avoid the names you have already received.

You answer 18 questions

The questionnaire is mostly multiple choice, with a few short text fields. It is the only input the system gets, so the questions are chosen to cover what actually changes a name:

• What you are naming: a company, a shop or venue, a product, an app or service
• Your trade and what you sell, in a sentence
• Where you are: country and city, so the names sound local and the statistics are drawn from the right market
• Who your customers are and how you want them to feel
• The tone you want, from established and plain to playful and coined
• Words that must appear, words to avoid, and competitors to steer clear of
• Practical constraints: length, whether the trade word should be in the name, whether you need it to work as a domain

Real names in your trade are counted

Before writing anything, SmartName pulls the names of real businesses in your trade from a live set of over 900,000 business names across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Ireland, drawn from map data. Then it counts:

• How many words the names typically have
• Whether the trade word ("Plumbing", "Bakery", "Dental") comes first, last, or is left out
• Which words are common in your trade, and which are rising among newer businesses
• Whether names tend to be descriptive, place-based, personal-name-based, or coined

This is what makes the difference between a name that sounds like it belongs in your industry and one that sounds like it was made up by a machine that had never seen your industry. The structure is borrowed from real names; the words are new.

The directions are set

A direction is a distinct way of thinking about what your name should do: from the raw materials, from a local landmark, from an old plain word, from a coined word with a hidden meaning, and so on. Using your brief and the counts from step 3, the AI designs 5, 10 or 20 of them depending on your plan, and makes sure they are genuinely different from each other rather than variations of one idea.

Your preferences lead. If the market in your trade does one thing and you have asked for another, the directions follow you, and one direction is added showing the common form so you can see it and decide for yourself.

Candidates are generated, then machine-checked

The AI writes several candidates per direction: about 50 for Light, about 125 for Standard, up to 200 for Premium. Every candidate then goes through a program, not a person, that rejects any name which:

• Contains a word you asked to avoid, or is missing a word you asked for
• Matches or closely resembles a competitor you listed
• Is identical to a well-known brand
• Has an offensive or embarrassing meaning in any of seven languages
• Breaks a practical constraint from your brief, such as length

What reaches the next step has already passed. This is the part that free generators leave to you.

The best are selected and each gets its case

From the candidates that passed, the AI selects the strongest 10, 25 or 40, keeping every direction represented. Then, for each selected name, it writes three things:

• Meaning and origin: what the word or words mean and where they come from, in a line or two
• A short tagline: one phrase showing how the name would be used
• The case, about 150 words: what the name says to your customers, how it reads on a sign and in a URL, why it fits its direction, and what it deliberately avoids

The Light plan writes on the current Claude Opus (Opus 5.5). Standard and Premium write on Anthropic's top model, Claude Fable 5.1. If any name comes back without its case, the system writes it again before delivering; it will not deliver an incomplete set.

Your names arrive

Light and Standard appear on screen when ready. Premium is also sent to your e-mail address, so you can close the page and read it later. Star the names you like, download the whole set as a PDF to share or a CSV to sort, and take your time. Members can reopen any delivery from their My page.