Every week someone asks: “how much is my domain worth?” The honest answer is “the most a real buyer will actually pay” — but that’s not useful for pricing. Here’s a framework that actually is.
The four base variables
Length. Shorter is more valuable. The market values single-character domains in seven figures, 2-letter at $50K-$1M+, 3-letter at $5K-$50K, 4-letter at $500-$10K. Past 6-7 characters, length stops mattering and brand becomes the driver.
TLD. .com still anchors valuation — the rest of the world prices off of it. .ai commands premium for AI-fit names. .io for developer/infra. ccTLDs (.de, .fr, .co.uk) trade at significant discounts to the matching .com but carry strong local-SEO value in their target country.
Brandability. A made-up word that sounds plausible (“Strapi”, “Notion”) prices higher than a typo of an existing word. A dictionary word in a clear commercial category (“insurance”, “hotels”) prices higher than the same word in a niche category (“baking”, “weaving”).
Search demand. Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush — if a meaningful number of people search the domain name as a query, that’s measurable demand. Names with built-in search traffic price 2-5× similar names without it.
The multiplier: buyer fit
All four base variables get multiplied (sometimes by 10×, sometimes by 0.1×) by buyer fit.
A 4-letter .com appraised at $3K from comps can sell to the right buyer for $30K — if the buyer’s brand exactly matches the letters. The same domain sells to a generic buyer for $3K.
This is why marketplace appraisals are statistical: they predict the median sale, not the right-buyer sale. The spread between the two can be 10×.
Where to find comps
NameBio is the public industry archive — every reported domain sale, searchable by length / TLD / pattern. Filter by recent dates (last 24 months) and matching characteristics. Two-thirds of NameBio’s data comes from wholesale (investor-to-investor) sales, so those numbers are floors, not ceilings.
DNJournal publishes a weekly verified-sales list with prices that skew higher (more end-user retail). Deepnom’s intel module ingests both.
Recent end-user sales in your category matter most. A $5,000 SaaS-named .com sale six months ago is more predictive for your similar SaaS-named .com than a $50,000 e-commerce sale a year ago.
A working pricing process
- Find 10-20 comps from the last 24 months matching your domain on length + TLD + category.
- Drop the top 10% and bottom 10% as outliers.
- Take the median of what’s left. That’s your wholesale-realistic floor.
- Multiply by 2-5× for an end-user retail asking price.
- List with
min_offer_usdset at your floor and BIN at the high end of your retail range.
What NOT to do
- Don’t use the registrar’s automated appraisal as your floor. Those tools optimize for upsell, not accuracy.
- Don’t price based on what you paid. Sunk cost is irrelevant to market value.
- Don’t refuse to negotiate from your asking. A name that sits unsold for two years at $50K is worth less than the same name sold for $25K today.