How to price a domain you own

What you paid is irrelevant. So is the figure an appraisal tool hands back, and so is the sum you'd need to recoup nine years of renewals. A domain is worth what one particular buyer will pay inside the next year or two. Every useful pricing exercise is really an exercise in working out who that buyer is and what owning the string spares them.

The order matters. Buyer type first, then closed comparable sales, then the number below which you'd rather keep the name, then the number you publish. Most owners start at the last step. That's why they get stuck.

Your buyer is a specific person, not a market

The same eight letters can be worth a few hundred or a few hundred thousand depending entirely on who might want them. Before anything else, work out which of three buckets your name sits in.

• End-user names. Someone will build a company on it. A clean two-word .com in a commercial category, say, or an exact-match term for a service people actually pay for. These carry the top prices because the buyer isn't comparing your ask against other domains. They're comparing it against rebranding costs, paid acquisition budgets and the credibility they're currently leaking.
• Reseller names. Perfectly good, but the likely buyer is another investor who has to resell at a margin. They'll pay a fraction of end-user value, and usually a small one. That isn't a slight on your name. It's the price of instant liquidity.
• Names with no buyer at all. Long, hyphenated, trademark-adjacent, or built on a phrase nobody has ever typed. An enormous number of domains live here. The honest response is to let them expire rather than fund a decade of renewals waiting for a call that isn't coming.

Then get precise. "Anyone in fintech" is not a buyer pool. "Seed-stage payroll startups that raised in the last 18 months" is one, and you can count them on a spreadsheet. A name with fifty plausible buyers prices nothing like a name with two.

Listings are wishes, closings are data

Comparable sales are the nearest thing to ground truth you'll get. Public sales databases and marketplace archives show what similar names closed at, which is a very different quantity from what hopeful owners asked. Ignore the asks.

When you hunt for comps, match on the attributes that actually move a number:

• Extension. A .com and the identical string on a newer extension are separate assets. Never price one off the other.
• Length and word count. One word beats two, two beats three, roughly, all else held level.
• Category. A five-letter word in insurance or legal outsells the same-length word in a hobby niche, because the buyer's own customer is worth more.
• Recency. A sale from a bull run five years ago is history, not a comp.

Now adjust downwards for everything you'd rather not think about: the awkward spelling, the plural fighting the singular, the word that means something unfortunate in another large market, the term one enormous trademark holder already owns in every buyer's mind. Adjust upwards only for real advantages. Genuine search volume on the exact phrase. An existing backlink profile. A string that's a recognised product category rather than an invented one.

Fewer than three usable comps and you're holding something unusual. Widen your confidence interval accordingly and list it for offers rather than faking a precision you don't have.

Find the floor before you pick the ask

Your walk-away number is the price at which you'd honestly prefer to keep the domain. It should come out of arithmetic rather than pride.

Start with carrying cost: the annual renewal multiplied by however many more years you're realistically willing to hold. Add the acquisition price. Then discount for time, because money now beats a possibly-larger sum in four years, and every year of holding is another renewal plus the risk that the category goes quiet. A name renewing at £12 that you'll sit on for another eight years carries about a hundred pounds of future cost. That's decisive on a £400 name and noise on a £40,000 one.

Then account for the transaction. On Names.com, sellers pay 15% commission on a completed sale and buyers pay nothing, so a £10,000 close nets you £8,500. Put that in your floor now rather than meeting it at signing.

Three ways to ask, each buying something different

Fixed price buys speed and costs you the ceiling

A published buy-it-now closes faster and appeals to buyers who loathe negotiating, a group that includes a great many busy founders. The cost is your upside. If some large company would have paid ten times your figure, you've handed them a discount and a story to tell. Use fixed pricing when your name sits inside a well-comped band and speed is worth more to you than the tail.

One sanity check: set the number at a level where you'd be pleased to sell today, not merely willing. If it makes you wince, it's too low to publish.

Make offer buys the tail and costs your evenings

Offer listings earn their keep when value swings on identity. A name worth £3,000 to a freelancer and £60,000 to a funded competitor should not carry one price. What you pay is friction and patience. Expect a long procession of lowballs, and decide in advance the threshold below which you simply don't reply, so you aren't relitigating your own floor at eleven at night.

When you do name a figure in negotiation, make it specific. £27,500 reads as considered. £30,000 reads as an opening position and invites a counter at half.

Lease buys cash flow and costs you flexibility

Leasing fits buyers who want the brand immediately and can't fund the purchase outright. It produces income, keeps the asset in your name until the terms are met, and frequently converts into a sale at a total figure above what any upfront buyer would have written a cheque for. It also ties the name up and hands you a counterparty to manage. Names.com supports sales and leases both, so you can list for outright purchase while staying open to a structured deal.

What the silence is telling you

Pricing isn't a single decision. Put the name up and read the signals across three to six months.

• Nothing at all. That's usually a discovery or buyer-pool problem, not a price one. A name nobody wants at £20,000 is generally a name nobody wants at £2,000.
• Conversations that die at your number. Genuine price signal. Three separate buyers walking at the same threshold is the market telling you where its ceiling sits.
• Offers bunched far below the ask. Check who's making them. All resellers? Then you own a reseller name. Price it as one or hold out for an end user, but stop expecting both.

When you cut, cut properly. Shaving 5% signals nothing and the buyers who passed won't come back to look. Nor should you reprice weekly; a number that moves constantly reads as distress.

The parts nobody enjoys hearing

Most domains are worth less than their owners believe. Automated valuation tools return a figure for every name, including the ones with no buyer anywhere, which is exactly why the figure can't be trusted at the low end. Sales take longer than anyone plans for; a genuinely good name can sit a full year before the right founder turns up. And the single largest determinant of price isn't cleverness. It's whether a real business needs that exact string to launch.

If you work through all of this and conclude your name has no plausible buyer, stop renewing it and put the money behind one you can defend. Coming at it from the other direction, if you want a name to build on rather than flip, The Name Studio generates brandable .com options and checks each against the live registry, so everything it shows you can actually be registered.

Both sides of every deal on Names.com run through escrow, so nobody pays or transfers first. That settles the trust question and leaves the only one worth arguing about: is the number right.