Anyone new to the domain market quickly runs into the same question: what’s a name actually worth? The answer is rarely a single number. Domain appraisal is closer to pricing a second-hand guitar than pricing a gram of gold — there’s a market, there are comparables, and there’s a band within which reasonable buyers and sellers land.
This guide covers what to look at when you’re trying to price a name you own, or when you’re trying to decide whether a listing is fairly priced before you make an offer.
The things that actually move the price
Length. Four-character .com names consistently command higher prices than longer ones. Five and six characters still do well. Past eight, pricing flattens sharply unless the name is a strong English word or phrase.
TLD. A .com is the reference point. Other TLDs (.io, .ai, .xyz, .co, .net) trade at discounts of 30-70% to their .com equivalent, depending on the industry. A .com that happens to be a generic English word — like road.com or blue.com — sits in its own category.
Pronounceability. A name you can say out loud without spelling it wins. This is why made-up two-syllable names (stripe, wise, kava) have sold for real money even though they don’t mean anything before a company is attached to them.
Search volume and commercial intent. If the domain matches a keyword that advertisers bid on, there’s an upper bound floor: the value of the organic clicks the name will capture over its lifetime. Tools like the Google Keyword Planner give you a rough sense.
Age. Aged domains — ten, fifteen, twenty years old — tend to price above fresh registrations of similar quality, partly because of retained backlinks and partly because of the scarcity premium.
Things that matter less than people think
“Brandability.” This is a vibe word. When someone tells you a name is brandable, ask them which industries and at what price point. The same name can be very brandable for a yoga studio and completely wrong for a fintech.
Social handle availability. It’s a tie-breaker, not a core driver. If a founder really wants the name, they’ll rename their existing handles.
Traffic. Legacy domains sometimes have meaningful type-in traffic. New registrations essentially never do. Don’t pay a premium for traffic you can’t verify independently.
Tools that help — with honest limits
Automated appraisal tools (GoDaddy’s, Estibot, a few others) are trained mostly on historical public sale data. They’re useful for sanity-checking order of magnitude — is this a $500 name or a $50,000 name? — but they can’t tell you whether a specific buyer today will pay more or less. The name zoom.com was worth substantially more after 2020 than its 2019 algorithmic appraisal would have suggested.
NameBio is the most useful public sales database. You can search for comparable sales — same length, same TLD, same word pattern — and see what they actually sold for. This is the single most grounded data point available for free.
A simple framework
If you want a starting number, try this:
- Look up 3-5 comparable sales on NameBio (similar length, TLD, pattern).
- Take the median, not the mean. A few outlier sales skew the average.
- Adjust up if your name has a clearer commercial use, stronger pronounceability, or is aged. Adjust down if it depends heavily on one specific industry.
- Price 15-30% above where you’d actually be willing to sell. Most serious buyers negotiate.
When to walk away
A listing priced 5x or more above what comparable sales support usually isn’t going to move on negotiation. Don’t waste three rounds of emails — either meet them where they are or move on. The domain market has enough supply that a reasonable substitute exists for almost any brief.
Appraisal gets easier with reps. If you track a handful of sales every week on NameBio for a few months, you start developing a feel for pricing that no tool replicates.