The $12 is rent paid to the registry for a name nobody has claimed; the thousands are the price of a name someone already owns and that other businesses would also want. Every short, meaningful .com was taken years ago, so the good ones trade on an aftermarket priced by comparable sales, like property. The median publicly reported .com sale in 2024 to 2026 was about $5,000, and the strongest names sell for six and seven figures.
Short answer: registration and ownership are different things. The $12 a year is what the registry charges to keep any name in the system, like the ground rent on a plot. A name that is already taken is not available for $12 at any price, because someone owns the right to it. If that name is short, memorable and means something, other businesses want it too, and that is what creates a price.
Here is where the aftermarket comes from, what sets the number on a particular name, and how to tell a fair price from a hopeful one.
Every English dictionary word in .com was registered by the late 1990s. Every two-letter and three-letter .com is long gone. The combinations people naturally think of for a product or a company were claimed, one by one, over thirty years, and the ones not in use are held by investors who paid for them. One for-sale portfolio alone holds about 3.5 million .com names.
So when you look up a name and find it "taken but for sale", you are not being charged $5,000 for something that costs $12. You are being offered a specific asset that cannot be manufactured, at a price set by what similar assets have sold for.
The distribution is steep. Most names on the aftermarket are priced in the low thousands; a small set of one-word .coms sell for hundreds of thousands or millions; and in between sits everything from short brandables to two-word phrases. The number on a particular name is set by where it falls on that curve, and the curve is drawn by comparable sales.
Comparable sales. Names of the same length, extension and type that have sold, and for how much. This is the evidence a price rests on. Every listing on our marketplace shows the comparables its appraisal considered.
How many businesses would want it. A name that fits one niche has one buyer. "Capital", "Solar" or "Pulse" fit thousands. The width of the buyer pool is most of the difference between $2,000 and $200,000.
The extension. .com carries the premium; .ai now does for AI-relevant words; most others trade at a fraction. The same word in .net or .co is a different, cheaper asset.
What it saves the buyer. A clean name saves years of "no, it's spelled..." and of traffic leaking to a better-named competitor. Companies that outgrow a compromise name routinely pay six figures to fix it later. The price of the good name now is usually less than the price of the upgrade later.
Sellers set their own prices. Some price from comparable sales; some price from hope. The way to tell is to put the asking price next to an independent retail range for the name. Inside the range is a fair retail ask. Far above it is a seller waiting for the one buyer who does not check. Far below it is worth a closer look at why.
On our marketplace every listing carries its own appraisal, with the reasoning and comparables, next to the price. Sellers set their own prices; the appraisal is independent of the seller, and sometimes it disagrees with the price. That is the point: you can see the evidence before you decide, and make an offer from it.
Almost never. Owners of valuable names renew them, and the few that lapse are caught at expiry by drop-catching services and auctioned, usually for more than the owner was asking. If a name is listed for sale, waiting for it to drop is not a strategy.
Because .com is the default people type and remember. In our reported-sales corpus for 2024 to 2026, .com accounts for 69% of sales and 77% of the dollars. A business on another extension permanently shares its name with whoever owns the .com, and some of its traffic and email goes there.
The owner, with a view to comparable sales. A serious seller prices from what similar names have sold for; a hopeful one prices from what they would like. An independent appraisal on the listing tells you which you are looking at, and most sellers accept offers below the listed price.
Good names have held and grown their value over decades, and resale pairs on the biggest sales charts have outpaced inflation. But most registered domains are worth nothing, and the ones that are valuable are illiquid: it can take years for the right buyer to arrive. Buy a name because your business needs it, and treat any later resale value as a bonus.
Every domain on our marketplace shows its independent appraisal: the range, the reasoning, and the comparable sales. Browse by category, extension, length and budget.
See the appraisal on any listing