Its kind of expensive. About $30-50k for the entire process. For a big company with deep pockets and IP lawyers already on retainer that price is just the cost of doing business and an investment of beating the competition. If your an individual $30k for a not sure bet is a hell of a lot of money.

A good friend patented a makeup applicator and she's not sure if she'll ever get that money back.

You can DIY-it for a lot less. I patented an invention for about $2k. I wrote the claims, specification, and produced the technical drawings myself. Then I had everything reviewed by a patent attorney. If you have a lot of spare money or you're hoping that your patent is going to be the next big thing you may want to shell out for patent lawyers though.

On the other hand, there are cases where even the pros make serious mistakes in drafting patents despite all of the money they charge, because no one really understands an invention like the inventor. So there's a lot to be said for understanding how the patent process works, especially if you might become a prolific inventor at some point, which it sounds like this teenager is well on his way toward. Then it's likely worth the time investment to understand the basics of IP law and patents.

Why does it cost so much to file a patent? Isn't one able to draft and submit an application by themselves?

You can do a lot of things on your own and you may even be successful at it but there are so many roadblocks intentionally put in your way. If you don't have the expertise to file an application paying someone else to counsel may be prudent. If you do have the expertise you'll probably make more being hired to file than the actual patent filer.

Anyway, she thought of an idea. Sketched and prototyped it. Hired a lawyer to file it and that was step 1. She wasn't able to manufacture, license, or sell her patent.

She went back to being a makeup artist and was mildly successful streaming.

Other friends with patents work for large corps (Siemens, Microsoft, Motorola) who handle it all automatically. They might have got a plaque and a annual bonus for their effort. None are wildly richer for it.

I got a dollar, for mine...

It doesn't cost that much to file a patent. It costs a ton of money to hire lawyers though.

Even publishing it gets him a 1 year inventor's grace period where his publication can act as prior art to stop others from patenting, but doesn't stop him from patenting, under the newish first to file rules. But I dont know about internationally.

The USPTO's grace period is very generous internationally. About 16 countries have comparable rules.[1] In most of Europe, any public disclosure beforehand completely prohibits you from getting a patent. So if you want protection outside the Americas and Eastern Asia, you should still not disclose anything before you get a patent.

[1]: https://www.mewburn.com/law-practice-library/grace-periods-f...

Probably. Given some years back the US moved to a first-to-file system, getting an initial patent application filed to establish that date is probably not a bad idea and isn't too terribly expensive.

Can be done for just the filing fee. But you'd likely want to have council help, about $6k last I looked.

You don't need a completed application to get a provisional going. A suitable written description is enough, and is something an individual can probably do on their own. The USPTO even has a whole section providing resources and assistance for folks to do this:

https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/using-legal-services/pr...

That said, promoting that to a full non-provisional application is not something most people should do without a patent attorney as it takes real skill in the art (ha!) to get the claim set right.

Just make sure to use the phrase “or plurality of” a lot.