The trade-off nobody explains, the question that settles it, and the cheap filing that buys you time to decide.

Patents and trade secrets protect the same kind of thing in opposite ways: one publishes your invention in exchange for a monopoly, the other keeps it hidden and gives you no monopoly at all.

So which one does your business actually need?

We asked Jacques Stemmet, a senior associate at Dommisse Attorneys who runs the firm’s IP and trademark practice, how founders should decide…

A patent gives you roughly 20 years of exclusivity, but only because you’ve published the full recipe for anyone to read. A trade secret lasts forever, costs nothing to register, and protects you against nobody who works it out independently. Neither is better; they suit different businesses.

A patent is a monopoly you buy with disclosure. A trade secret is protection you keep only as long as it stays secret.

A patent buys a time-limited monopoly you can enforce, in the countries where you file, in exchange for full public disclosure. A trade secret buys indefinite protection at no registration cost, but only against people who steal it, not against anyone who reverse-engineers or independently invents the same thing. Get those two shapes clear before you weigh anything else.

This is the question that settles most cases. If your invention is visible in the product, a competitor can buy one, take it apart and copy it, and secrecy protects you for exactly as long as it takes them to do that. If it’s a process, a formula or a method nobody outside the business ever sees, secrecy can hold indefinitely.

If your edge is a physical product or a mechanism that ships to customers, patent it, because it will be picked apart anyway and disclosure costs you little you weren’t going to lose. If your edge is how you do something internally, keep it secret and never file, because a patent would hand competitors the one thing they couldn’t otherwise get.

If you genuinely can’t call it yet, South Africa lets you file provisionally at low cost, which secures your priority date and gives you a window to decide before committing to full disclosure. It’s the practical middle path: you keep the patent option open while you test whether the market even cares. Just don’t let the window lapse by accident.

Choose deliberately, and you stop either paying for a patent that publishes your only real advantage, or relying on secrecy for something a competitor can buy off the shelf and take apart in an afternoon.

This is one piece of What You Own vs What You Think You Own, Jacques’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab, which walks through the whole system for proving and protecting what your business owns:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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