How to price a domain you own

The price of a domain is not what you paid for it, not what a valuation tool says, and not what you need to break even. It is what one specific buyer will pay in the next year or two. Everything useful in pricing comes from getting more precise about who that buyer is and what the name saves them.

Here is a workable sequence: identify the buyer type, find real comparable sales, set a walk-away number, then set an ask above it. Most owners skip straight to the ask and get stuck.

Start with who actually buys this name

Domains have wildly different prices depending on who the plausible buyer is. Sort your name into one of three buckets before you do anything else.

• End-user names. A company will build a brand on it. Think a clean two-word .com in a commercial category, or an exact-match term for a service people pay for. These carry the highest prices because the buyer is comparing your ask against rebranding costs, paid acquisition budgets and lost credibility — not against other domains.
• Reseller names. Decent, but the buyer is another domain investor who needs to resell at a profit. They will pay a fraction of end-user value, typically a small fraction. That is not an insult; it is the cost of instant liquidity.
• Names with no buyer. Long, hyphenated, trademark-adjacent, or a phrase nobody searches for. Plenty of domains fall here. The honest move is to let them drop rather than pay renewals for a decade waiting for a call.

Be specific about the buyer. "Anyone in fintech" is not a buyer pool. "Seed-stage payroll startups that raised in the past 18 months" is, and you can count them. A name with fifty realistic buyers prices very differently from one with two.

Find comparables, then adjust them honestly

Comparable sales are the closest thing to ground truth. Public sales databases and marketplace archives will give you a feel for what similar names have actually closed at, not what they were listed at. Listings are wishes; closings are data.

When you search comps, match on the attributes that move price:

• Extension. A .com and the same string on a newer extension are not the same asset. Do not use one to price the other.
• Length and word count. One-word beats two-word beats three-word, roughly, all else equal.
• Commercial category. A word in insurance, legal or finance sells for more than the same-length word in a hobby niche, because the buyer's customer is worth more.
• Recency. Sales from a bull market five years ago are not a current comp.

Then adjust down for the things you would rather ignore: an awkward spelling, a plural that fights the singular, a word that means something different in another major market, or a term that is dominated by one large trademark holder. Adjust up only for genuine advantages — real search volume for the exact phrase, an existing backlink profile, or a string that is a common product category rather than an invented word.

If you find fewer than three usable comps, your name is unusual and your confidence interval should be wide. Price it as a make-offer listing rather than pretending to precision you do not have.

Set a walk-away number before you set an ask

The walk-away number is the price below which you would genuinely rather keep the domain. It should come from arithmetic, not pride.

Work out your carrying cost: annual renewal multiplied by how many more years you are honestly prepared to hold. Add what you paid. Then apply a discount for time — money now is worth more than a maybe-larger sum in four years, and every year you hold is a year of renewals plus the risk that the category cools. If a name renews at £12 and you will hold it another eight years, that is roughly a hundred pounds of future cost, which matters enormously on a £400 name and not at all on a £40,000 one.

Also account for the sale itself. On Names.com, sellers pay 15% commission on a completed sale and buyers pay nothing, so a £10,000 close nets £8,500. Build that into your floor rather than discovering it at signing.

Choose the ask: fixed price, make offer, or lease

Once you have a floor, the ask is a strategic choice, and each format buys you something different.

Fixed price

A published buy-it-now converts faster and attracts buyers who hate negotiating — which includes a lot of busy founders. The trade-off is that you cap your upside. If a large company was going to pay ten times your number, a fixed price hands them a bargain. Use fixed pricing when your name sits in a well-comped band and you value speed.

A useful sanity check: set the fixed price at a level where you would be pleased, not merely willing, to sell today. If the number makes you wince, it is too low for a buy-it-now.

Make offer

Make-offer listings work when the value depends heavily on who is asking — a name that is worth £3,000 to a freelancer and £60,000 to a funded competitor. The cost is friction and time. Expect a long tail of low offers, and decide in advance the number below which you will not reply, so you are not re-litigating your floor at 11pm.

If you do quote a price in negotiation, quote a specific one. £27,500 reads as considered; £30,000 reads as a starting position and invites a counter at half.

Lease

Leasing suits names where the buyer wants the brand now and cannot fund the purchase outright. It generates cash flow, keeps the asset in your name until terms are met, and often converts to a sale later at a total figure above what an upfront buyer would have paid. It also ties the name up and gives you a counterparty to manage. Names.com supports both sales and leases, so you can list a name for outright purchase and remain open to a structured deal.

Test the price, then adjust on evidence

Pricing is not a one-shot decision. Put the name up, then read the signals over three to six months.

• No enquiries at all. The problem is usually discovery or buyer pool, not price. A name nobody wants at £20,000 is often a name nobody wants at £2,000 either.
• Enquiries that stop dead at your number. That is a genuine price signal. If three separate buyers walk at the same threshold, the market has told you where the ceiling is.
• Offers clustering well below your ask. Look at who is making them. If they are all resellers, your name is a reseller name and you should price accordingly or hold for an end-user.

Cut in meaningful steps when you cut. Shaving 5% signals nothing; buyers who passed will not revisit. And do not reprice weekly — a name whose price moves constantly reads as distressed.

The unglamorous truths

Most domains are worth less than their owners believe. Automated valuation tools produce a number for every name, including names with no buyer, which is precisely why the number is unreliable at the low end. Sales take longer than expected; a good name can sit for a year before the right founder appears. And the biggest single determinant of price is not cleverness — it is whether a real business needs that exact string to launch.

If you conclude that a name you own has no plausible buyer, the right decision is to stop renewing it and put the attention into one you can defend. If you are on the other side and looking for a name to build on rather than sell, The Name Studio generates brandable .com options and checks each against the live registry, so everything it shows can actually be registered.

Both sides of any deal on Names.com run through escrow, so neither party pays or transfers first. That removes the trust question and leaves you with the only one that matters: is the number right.