One filing verb, documented.

The Meter releases on the receipt

Every price on this surface is metered on a ProofPredicate — a deterministic, government-issued fact, the USPTO receipt — and on nothing else. No state in the machine ever holds an unearned fee: an open filing returns a typed ACCEPTED with the Meter unreleased, and the fee releases only when the receipt lands. No filing, no charge.

Open acts and reserved acts

The pro-se provisional patent filing is an OPEN act — an applicant may file their own, so your agent completes it end to end with no credential and no Legal Fee. Utility filings, office-action responses, and trademark OA responses are RESERVED acts in the platform-counsel-owned Reserved-Act Catalog: a licensed human signs under their own credential. filings.legal describes them and routes them to a Signer through gigs.lawyer; it never sells them and never implies an agent can sign.

The typed states

ACCEPTED

An open filing was accepted and is tracked on the substrate; the Meter is present and unreleased until the receipt.

PENDING_SIGNER

A reserved filing routes to an independent licensed professional; carries the required credential, a sovereign refusal, and no ship date.

OK / EMPTY / BLOCKED

The AXP list envelopes on /filings: OK with results, a truthful EMPTY set, or a BLOCKED platform-reserved scope. Never a faked success.

On the substrate

filings.legal holds no Matter state of its own. Its live capability — keyless status reads and the provisional mint — is served by calling api.lawyer, the whole substrate catalog. filings.legal is narrower than api.lawyer (the filing verb alone, receipt-metered) and broader than patent.click (every agency, not just patents).

Preview build — in-memory demo state on the substrate, no live filings. Nothing here is legal advice.