You may be checking a name you own before you answer an offer, a name you are about to bid on, or a price someone quoted you. In all three cases the same habit protects you: never trust a figure you cannot trace back to a sale.
The quick check
On SoldComparables the quick check takes one search and no account. Anyone can run one search per day. You see three comparable sales, each with its price, venue and date, plus the estimate range. The rest of the comparable list is locked until you sign up, at which point you get one one-time full report with every comp, the full estimate and the written rationale.
Three comparable sales are usually enough for a first answer. You will see quickly whether names like yours trade in the low four figures, the high four figures or above.
Why checkers disagree so much
If you have ever typed the same name into three free checkers, you have probably seen three very different numbers. That is not surprising once you know how they are built.
- Some are automated models. They score a name on traits (length, keywords, extension, search interest) and output a figure. You see the figure, not the sales behind it.
- Some are registrar tools. These are free and fast and are designed by companies that also sell domains. They generally do not show the recorded sales behind the estimate.
- Some are paid expert appraisals. A person looks at your name and writes an opinion. These take longer and are priced per name. Check each provider's site for current pricing.
- Some are comparable sales tools. They show you which sales they compared against and leave the judgement visible.
None of these is useless. But only the last kind lets you check the work, and that is what turns a number into something you can act on.
How to sanity check any checker's number
Whatever tool gave you the figure, these five tests take a few minutes and catch most bad estimates.
1. Ask whether the figure is above the public sales floor
Every sale in our corpus is at least 1,000 USD, because public sales reports only list sales at or above that amount. The median recorded sale is 1,900 USD and 86.8 percent of recorded sales are below 5,000 USD. If a checker tells you an unremarkable long .com is worth 15,000 USD, ask which recorded sales support that. Most names never reach the public reports at all.
2. Find three real sales that resemble your name
Look for names with the same extension, a similar length and a similar meaning. If you cannot find three recorded sales near the checker's number, the number is probably high.
3. Check the venue of those sales
A sale at an expired auction tells you what investors pay. A sale at an end-user marketplace tells you what a business paid. The gap can be large. freckle.io sold for 1,121 USD (Park.io, 2022-09-08) and later for 20,000 USD (Afternic, 2025-08-14). beguile.com went for 2,475 USD (DropCatch, 2024-08-25), then 20,000 USD (Afternic, 2025-07-31). If your checker quotes a retail-level price, make sure you are actually selling to an end user.
4. Check the dates
A comparable sale from 2021 may describe a different market. The .ai extension is the clearest case: 152 recorded .ai sales in 2021 against 2,070 in 2025. Prefer recent comps and treat older ones as context.
5. Look for an outlier doing all the work
One very large sale can drag a lazy average up. If a checker's figure leans on a single record, such as cloud.ai at 600,000 USD (GoDaddy, 2025-07-02), and your name is a long two-word .ai, that comp is not telling you much about your name.
A worked sanity check
Suppose a free checker says a short developer-term .ai name is worth 45,000 USD. Here is how the check might go using recorded sales.
| Comparable | Price | Venue | Date | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kernel.ai | 14,599 USD | Dynadot | 2024-10-08 | Single developer word, investor venue |
| workflow.ai | 35,000 USD | Park.io | 2023-01-07 | Common workflow term, investor venue |
| webhook.ai | 2,424 USD | Namecheap | 2025-10-08 | Narrower developer term, recent |
| server.ai | 29,400 USD | Namecheap | 2025-02-25 | Broad infrastructure word, recent |
| debug.ai | 15,000 USD | Whois.ai | 2023-06-05 | Short developer verb |
Five relevant comps, all at investor venues, mostly between roughly 2,400 USD and 35,000 USD. A 45,000 USD figure sits above every one of them. That does not make it impossible, especially from an end-user buyer, but it tells you the checker's number is a retail best case, not a likely wholesale price. You now know what to ask a buyer for and what to expect from an investor.
What makes a checker trustworthy
Use this list when choosing any tool, ours included.
- It shows the sales it used, with price, venue and date.
- It links to where each sale was reported.
- It separates wholesale from retail.
- It gives a range and a confidence level, and widens the range when evidence is thin.
- It says so when there are no comparable recorded sales instead of producing a number anyway.
- It does not publish your searches or use them to buy names.
If a tool fails most of these, use its number as a rough signal at best.
How SoldComparables checks a name
Our checker reads the name the way a buyer would. Each sold domain in the corpus is split into words, and an embedding language model has precomputed which words are close in meaning. So a search for a scheduling term can surface sales of names built on "task", "job" or "scheduler", not only names that share the exact letters.
Every comparable gets a relevance score from 0 to 100 and up to three plain reasons, for example "Same .ai extension" or "Same length". Each sale is labelled by venue type. The estimate comes back as low, likely and high, with separate wholesale and retail figures and a confidence label. The written rationale names the comps it relied on and what would move the number up or down.
When fewer than three good comps exist, the result says so, widens the range and lowers confidence. When none exist above 1,000 USD, it tells you that names like yours usually trade below that.
Your searches stay private to your workspace. They are never published and never used to buy names. The result is a data-backed estimate, not a certified appraisal and not a guarantee of sale price.
Where to go next
If you want to understand how the range itself is built, the domain value estimator page walks through it. If you are an owner trying to decide whether to sell, the domain name value page covers wholesale versus end-user value in more depth.
Check a name now with the domain appraisal tool, or see what each plan includes on the pricing page.