Domain name value from an owner's point of view

If you are asking "what is my domain name worth", you probably own the name already. Maybe someone made an offer. Maybe you are cleaning up a portfolio, or you registered something years ago and wonder if it is an asset. This page is written for you, the owner, and it starts with the uncomfortable part.

Most names are worth less than owners hope

Every sale in our corpus of 128,867 recorded domain sales is at least 1,000 USD, because that is the reporting floor of the public sales reports we use. Within that set, the median sale is 1,900 USD and 86.8 percent of recorded sales are below 5,000 USD. Only 297 recorded sales reached 100,000 USD or more in five years.

Those are the names that sold well enough to be reported. A very large number of registered domains never sell at all, and many that do sell for less than 1,000 USD and never appear in any public chart. If our tool finds no comparable recorded sale for your name above 1,000 USD, it tells you so plainly (names like this usually trade below that) and does not make up a number.

This is not meant to discourage you. It is meant to calibrate you. Owners who know the base rates negotiate better, price faster and waste less time on listings that never move.

Wholesale value versus end-user value

The single most useful idea for an owner is that your name has two prices.

Wholesale value is what another investor would pay. Investors buy names to resell, so they pay a fraction of what they hope to get. This is the price you can usually realise quickly, at expired auctions or investor venues.

End-user value is what a business, a startup or a brand would pay because they want to use the name. They pay for the fit with their product, not for resale margin. This price is higher, but you need the right buyer to find you, and that can take months or years.

Our corpus shows the gap clearly. Wholesale venues (DropCatch, NameJet, Park.io, Dynadot, Namecheap and similar) have a median recorded sale of 1,725 USD and an average of 3,312 USD. End-user marketplaces (Afternic, Sedo, Atom.com, BuyDomains, Spaceship.com and similar) have a median of 2,288 USD and an average of 6,437 USD.

Individual names show it even more sharply.

The person who sold zip.ai in 2021 was not wrong about the wholesale market. They sold to the buyer who was there. Four years later the same name sold to an end user. Both prices were real. You decide which one you are chasing. There is more on this in our guide to wholesale vs retail domain prices.

What drives the value of your name

Owners tend to overweight the things they love about their name and underweight the things buyers check first. Buyers check:

• Extension. .com still accounts for 100,357 of our recorded sales. .org has 11,251, .ai 4,925, .net 3,578, .io 1,431 and .co 953. A .ai name sells to a narrower, tech-focused set of buyers.
• Length and clarity. Can someone hear it once and type it correctly? Three-letter .com names have a median recorded sale of 34,003 USD. After about five letters, length matters much less.
• Meaning. Is it a real word, a common phrase, a developer or AI term, or an invented brandable? Each has its own market.
• Spelling. Hyphens and digits usually narrow the buyer pool. Plurals matter less than people think: rebate.com and rebates.com each sold for 500,000 USD (Sedo, 2022-12-01).
• Timing. The .ai market went from 152 recorded sales in 2021 to 2,070 in 2025. What a name was worth three years ago may not be what it is worth now.

A realistic way to price your own name

Here is the sequence we would follow for any name we owned.

1. Find comparable recorded sales. Same extension, similar length, similar meaning. Five to ten is ideal, three is the minimum for any confidence.
2. Split them by venue. The investor-venue comps tell you your realistic wholesale price. The end-user comps tell you the ceiling if the right buyer finds you.
3. Check the dates. Weight recent sales more.
4. Decide your goal. Need cash soon? Price near the wholesale figure. Willing to wait? List near the end-user figure and be patient.
5. Keep evidence ready. When a buyer asks why the price is what it is, show them the comps. A price backed by recorded sales is easier to defend than a number from a free checker.

If an inbound offer arrives, compare it with the wholesale comps first. An offer well above them from an end user is often worth taking seriously, because many end-user deals never happen at all.

How SoldComparables values a name you own

Enter your name and the tool searches 128,867 recorded sales from May 2021 to May 2026, sourced from the public NamePros "Daily Domain Sales" reports that republish the NameBio top sales charts. Each comparable shows its price, venue, date and a link to the report it came from.

The search understands meaning, not just letters. Each sold name is split into words, and an embedding language model has precomputed which words are close in meaning, so a name built on "scheduler" can surface sales built on "cron", "task" or "job". Each comparable gets a relevance score from 0 to 100 and up to three plain reasons.

You get a low, likely and high estimate, a separate wholesale figure and retail figure, a confidence label and a written rationale that names the comps it used and lists what would raise or lower the number. With fewer than three good comps, it says so and widens the range.

It is a data-backed estimate, not a certified appraisal and not a guarantee of sale price. Your searches are private to your workspace, never published and never used to buy names.

For a quick verification of a figure someone quoted you, see the domain value checker. To browse what names like yours have sold for, look at sold domain names.

When to hold and when to sell

Hold if your name has strong end-user comps, you can afford the renewal fees, and you are not in a hurry. Sell at wholesale if the comps are thin, the renewal cost adds up across a portfolio, or the offer in front of you is above what investor venues usually pay for names like yours. Let go of names with no recorded comparable sales above 1,000 USD unless you have a specific buyer in mind.

Check your own name with the domain appraisal tool, or see what each plan includes on the pricing page.