DocketClear

About DocketClear

What it actually costs to sue, before you file.

DocketClear started with a frustration Eric ran into while trying to figure out whether suing a moving company over a damaged shipment was even worth the trouble. Every court website buried its fee schedule in a scanned PDF split out by county, and every blog post about small claims court led with three paragraphs of disclaimers before mentioning a single dollar figure.

So he built something better. DocketClear is a collection of free, no-account-required tools that give you the filing fee, the service-of-process cost, and the total it actually takes to sue — by state — and show you exactly which fee schedule each number came from.

Eric
Founder, DocketClear

Eric has spent years building small, single-purpose reference tools rather than working in law — his interest here is procedural, not legal. Court fee schedules are public documents, but no one had put them in one place a person could actually use before deciding whether a claim was worth filing. He built DocketClear to fix that.

Part of the Veraino network of free websites.

How it works

Every tool on DocketClear is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.

For DocketClear, an authoritative source means the fee schedule published directly by a state's judiciary or a county superior court — never a summary blog post or a legal-services site repeating a number without a citation. Every figure is checked against the primary court document before it ships, and rechecked on a recurring schedule since court fees change without much notice.

Our commitments

  • Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
  • We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
  • Honest about limitations. Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
  • Kept current. Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@docketclear.com. Eric reads every message personally.