That is the short answer. The longer one is about why a list of sold names matters more than any asking price, and how to read one without fooling yourself.
Why sold prices beat asking prices
Marketplaces are full of asking prices. An asking price tells you what one seller hopes to get. It says nothing about what a buyer agreed to pay. A sold price is the only number in the domain market that two parties signed off on.
This is why every serious valuation in domaining starts with domain name sales, not listings. When a broker defends a price to a buyer, the conversation is about names that sold. When an investor decides how much to bid at an expired auction, the question is what similar names fetched before.
What the recorded market actually looks like
Headlines are dominated by seven figure sales, so it is easy to believe that a good name is worth a fortune. The recorded data tells a quieter story.
| Measure across 128,867 recorded sales | Value |
|---|---|
| Median recorded sale | 1,900 USD |
| Share of sales below 5,000 USD | 86.8 percent |
| Sales at 100,000 USD or more | 297 |
| Period covered | 2021-05-28 to 2026-05-28 |
Remember the floor. The public reports only list sales of 1,000 USD and above, so the true median of all domain trades is lower still. Thousands of names change hands every week for a few hundred dollars or less and never appear in any report.
At the top, the picture is very different. The largest sale in the corpus is icon.com at 12,000,000 USD (Hilco Digital Assets, 2025-04-24). Behind it come help.com at 3,000,000 USD (Above.com, 2023-01-10), commerce.com at 2,200,000 USD (GetYourDomain.com, 2025-02-18) and anything.com at 2,000,000 USD (Private, 2025-12-12). These are real, but they are rare. Only 297 recorded sales cleared six figures in five years.
Where sold domain names come from
Every sale in SoldComparables comes from the public NamePros "Daily Domain Sales" reports, which republish NameBio top sales charts. We do not invent sales. Each record carries the domain, the price in USD, the venue, the date and a link to the report thread where it was published, so you can check it yourself.
Venues tell you what kind of sale it was
The venue is not a detail. It changes how you should read the price.
| Venue tier | Examples | Recorded sales | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expired auction / investor venue | DropCatch, NameJet, Park.io, Dynadot, Namecheap | 30,021 | 1,725 USD |
| End-user marketplace | BuyDomains, Afternic, Sedo, Atom.com, Spaceship.com | 23,816 | 2,288 USD |
| Mixed venue | mostly GoDaddy | 75,030 | 1,800 USD |
A sale at an expired auction is usually one investor buying from the market to resell later. A sale at an end-user marketplace is more often a business buying the name it wants to build on. The average retail sale in the corpus is 6,437 USD against 3,312 USD for wholesale. Mixing the two without labels is the most common way people misprice a name.
How to use sold domain names to value your own
A list of sold names is only useful if you pick the right ones. Here is the method that holds up.
- Match the extension first. A .com and a .ai with the same word are different assets with different buyers. Start within the same TLD.
- Match the structure. Length, one word or two, dictionary word or brandable, singular or plural, digits or hyphens. Each of these moves price.
- Match the meaning. A developer term sells to developer tools companies, an AI term sells to AI startups. Words with related meaning are better comps than words that only share letters.
- Separate wholesale from retail. Decide which price you are estimating. What an investor would pay and what an end user would pay are two different numbers.
- Check the date. Some segments move fast. The .ai market grew from 152 recorded sales in 2021 to 2,070 in 2025, so a 2021 .ai price is weak evidence for a 2026 decision.
Our guide to domain comps goes deeper into choosing and weighting each comparable.
Why searching by keyword is not enough
Searching a sales database for the exact word in your name works when the word is common. It fails for anything newer or rarer. If you own crons.ai, searching "crons" returns almost nothing. Yet there are clearly relevant sales of names built on scheduler, task and job words, plus short developer terms in .ai such as stack.ai at 72,999 USD (Dynadot, 2024-06-03) and kernel.ai at 14,599 USD (Dynadot, 2024-10-08).
Finding those requires understanding meaning, not matching letters.
How SoldComparables does it
SoldComparables splits every sold domain name into words. An embedding language model has precomputed which words are close in meaning, so "cron" sits near "scheduler", "task" and "job". When you search a name, we look for sold names that share meaning, extension, length, style and term class, then score each comp from 0 to 100.
Every comp shows up to three plain reasons, such as "Same .ai extension", "Shares the word cron" or "Same length", plus the venue tier and a link to the source report. The estimate on top gives a low, likely and high value, a wholesale and a retail figure, a confidence level, and a rationale that cites the comps by name, price and date.
If fewer than three good comps exist, the report says so, widens the range and lowers confidence. If no comparable recorded sale exists above 1,000 USD, it says that names like this usually trade below that, and it does not invent a number.
It is a data-backed estimate, not a certified appraisal and not a guarantee of a sale price.
Related pages
If you want to see the most recent entries, read recent domain sales. If one name has sold more than once, the domain sales history page explains how to read repeat sales.
Run a search on the domain appraisal tool to see the sold domain names closest to yours, or compare plans on the pricing page.