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SAIP Saudi Arabia — fee-schedule connector: research blocker
Status Cannot ship SA/SAIP/Fees patent/trademark/design FeeSchedule

connectors today. Halting at the research-gap boundary per task

instructions ("DO NOT invent fees").

Date: 2026-05-20 Worktree branch: worktree-agent-a24752035b2fa52a1 Off-ramp recommended by upstream research: research/national/sa-saip.md §4 — Option A (service-catalog reference document) ships, not a FeeItem connector.

§1 Why we're stopped

The task requires three FeeSchedule objects (patent / trademark / design) each with a real Decimal amount on every FeeItem, sourced from a live URL, with at least filing + renewal categories present.

That data is not extractable from any reachable source today.

Live probes 2026-05-20 (US residential egress)

Host Result
https://www.saip.gov.sa/en/ ConnectTimeout (curl exit 28, 15s) — confirms 2026-05-19 finding
https://eservices.saip.gov.sa/ ConnectTimeout (curl exit 28, 15s)
https://uqn.gov.sa/ ConnectTimeout (curl exit 28, 15s) — Umm al-Qura gazette, primary statutory source
https://tm.saip.gov.sa/ (not re-tested today; same finding 2026-05-19)

Packet-level block — no TLS handshake reached. This is not a Cloudflare 403 / WAF challenge / auth gate; it is whole-CIDR or whole-AS filtering at the SAIP edge. Mitigations require Saudi-egress or paid stealth-proxy infrastructure (Option B in the upstream research), neither of which is provisioned for this session.

Reachable secondary sources — insufficient for FeeItem-grade data

  • WIPO Lex 19743 — Implementing Regulations of the Law of Patents, Layout-Designs, Plant Varieties, and Industrial Designs (consolidated to SAIP Board Decision No. 5/8/2019 of 9 May 2019). PDF reached via signed CloudFront URL on wipolex-res.wipo.int after browser-style request from the WIPO Lex HTML detail page (signed-URL expires 2026-05-21 ≈; harvested 2026-05-20).

Inspection of the 49-page consolidated text: the only monetary fee table is page 49, titled "A table of the expenses stipulated in these regulations" — three rows, procedural fees only:

# Item Individuals (SAR) Institutions (SAR)
1 Seek correction or addition of precedence 400 800
2 Petition to return the application process 1,000 2,000
3 Seek extension of time limit 300 600

There is no filing / examination / grant / annuity / renewal fee table in this consolidated document. The substantive provisions reference "fees" but do not enumerate amounts — those are set by Board resolution and applied dynamically at filing time in the eServices portal. WIPO Lex 23123 (the principal Law M/27) is the primary statute and likewise does not enumerate tariff amounts.

Three procedural fees with a single individual-vs-institution split do not satisfy the task's quality bar of filing + renewal coverage across three rights.

  • Wayback Machine snapshots of saip.gov.sa — closest archived service-catalog page is /web/20250125031914/...services/ (2025-01-25). Extracted text body is ~1.1 KB (SPA shell, not server-rendered fee data); no numeric fee amounts present. Right-specific paths (/en/services/patents, /en/services/trademarks, /en/industrial-design) have no Wayback snapshots at all.

  • Research-anchored amounts in research/national/sa-saip.md §4: TM filing SAR 1,000/class; TM publication-for-opposition SAR 500; TM renewal publication ~USD 310 (post-June-2022 Board resolution). These are user-sourced notes, not citations to a fetchable primary source — and even taken at face value would cover only the trademark schedule, not patents or designs.

Architectural finding (from upstream research, confirmed)

SAIP does not publish a consolidated fee schedule analogous to:

  • OEPM Spain TASAS_y_PRECIOS_PUBLICOS.pdf (17 pages, every right)
  • INPI France download-document?id=20516 (every right)
  • IMPI Mexico Acuerdo.Tarifa.12.05.23.pdf (every right)
  • IPOS Singapore P/TM/D forms-and-fees HTML pages
  • TÜRKPATENT Turkey gazette + 3 HTML mirrors

Instead, fees are calculated dynamically at the point of filing in the eServices portal, with statutory authority fragmented across (a) the principal Law M/27, (b) its Implementing Regulations, and (c) periodic SAIP Board resolutions formally published in the Umm al-Qura gazette (uqn.gov.sa — also blocked).

This means even with Saudi egress / a stealth proxy in place, the deliverable shape is not "scrape a static schedule" — it would require reverse-engineering the eServices SPA fee-calculation endpoint (similar to the ILPO Israel ecom.gov.il work, with the additional layer of Nafath digital-identity gating that may block foreign-developer access entirely regardless of egress IP).

§2 What's missing to unblock

In rough order of how decisively they would unblock:

  1. Direct extraction from eservices.saip.gov.sa fee-calculation endpoint — requires either:
  2. Saudi-egress (Cloud Run with SA-resident IP, or a stealth-proxy provider with KSA pool such as Bright Data residential / Smartproxy KSA, ~$30–300/mo entry tier), and

  3. resolving whether Nafath digital-identity gating blocks access for non-resident developer accounts. If Nafath gates the entire portal (not just transactional endpoints), foreign-developer access is structurally infeasible regardless of egress routing.

  4. Umm al-Qura gazette (uqn.gov.sa) access for the post-2019 SAIP Board resolutions — same Saudi-egress requirement; gazette itself is the statutory source of record but is blocked at the same packet level as SAIP.

  5. Local KSA counsel to provide the current operative tariff directly (the user's existing notes anchor TM filing / publication / renewal amounts but not patent or design line items).

  6. Open Saudi Data initiative — SAIP has discussed publishing a consolidated downloadable service-catalog PDF (see research/national/sa-saip.md §4 Option C). No published timeline as of 2026-05-19. Quarterly check of saip.gov.sa/en/news/ (also blocked) would catch this; proxy via Wayback or user reports.

  7. Cloud-egress reachability probe (Cloud Run / EU / Asia egress) to confirm whether the SAIP block is US-CIDR-specific or applies uniformly to all non-Saudi egress. Would change the proxy- infrastructure conversation if Asia or EU egress reaches.

§3 What I did not do and why

  • Did not create src/patent_client_agents/fees/scrapers/saip.py — every code path led to either (a) inventing fee amounts not anchored to a fetchable primary source, or (b) shipping a FeeSchedule with three procedural rows and calling it complete, which would silently misrepresent SAIP coverage in fees/registry.py and atlas downstream.

  • Did not register "SAIP" in fees/registry.py — registering a scraper that cannot return real data would break the registry's invariant that every registered route resolves to a populated FeeSchedule on demand.

  • Did not write test fixtures from the 2019 Implementing Regulations PDF — the three procedural rows on page 49 are real and verifiable, but emitting them as the entirety of SA/SAIP/Patent would imply SAIP charges nothing for filing/examination/grant/ annuities, which is false.

  • Did not author RESEARCH_GAPS.md as a substitute deliverable beyond this note — the upstream research already has research/national/sa-saip.md as the canonical living document and FEES_TOP30_GAP.md tracks SAIP's gap prominently; duplicating that into a third doc would create drift.

Option A in the upstream research (service-catalog reference document) is still the correct v1. Implementing it would require:

  • A new shape in patent_client_agents.fees (not FeeSchedule) — closest sibling is the StaticLawCorpus pattern used by dpma_statutes / legifrance_ip, but tagged explicitly as reference-grade with the "fee calculated at filing time" caveat.
  • A separate atlas/manifest entry that does not silently inherit the FeeSchedule contract.
  • Coordinating with coverage/sources.yaml so the SAIP row exists with the correct yellow rating and kind: reference (or analogous) marker, not under the regular fees connector kind.

That work is out of scope for the current task (which is shaped around scrape_saip_*() functions emitting FeeSchedule); reshaping the deliverable contract should be a separate decision by the maintainer, not a freelance pivot during a connector PR.