How much should I sell my domain for?

Start from comparable sales of names with the same length, pattern and extension, not from an appraisal tool's number and definitely not from what you paid. Pull three to five tight comps, take the cluster rather than the outlier at the top, and set your asking price in the upper half of that range so you have somewhere to move in a negotiation. Then sanity check it against two things: the commission the venue takes, since Namecheap Market charges a flat 10% on each sale, and the price band you are landing in, because a $900 name and a $9,000 name attract completely different buyers. If you cannot find comps at all, that is usually a signal the buyer pool is thin, which argues for a lower, more liquid price rather than a hopeful one.

Why isn't my domain selling?

Most of the time the honest answer is that domains are illiquid and almost nothing sells quickly. Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire reported an annualized sell-through rate of 1.36% across his 2,500-name portfolio in the first half of 2024, and called 1% to 2% solid for a passive portfolio. At that rate the average listed name waits years. So before you blame the price, check whether enough time has actually passed. After that, the usual culprits are a price set from what you paid rather than from comps, a name with no identifiable buyer, a listing with no visible price, or a name whose extension has almost no resale demand. Price is the only one of those you can fix this afternoon.

Should I price a domain based on what I paid for it?

No. What you paid is information about your buying, not about the name's value, and the market has no interest in making you whole. The folk rule you will see repeated on forums, price at ten to thirty times your cost, produces a $299 asking price on a $10 hand registration and a $4,000 asking price on a name you overpaid for at auction, and neither number has anything to do with what a buyer would pay. Price from comps in both directions. That means accepting that a well-bought name can be worth far more than a multiple of its cost, and that a badly bought name is worth what it is worth no matter how much you spent.

Is it better to price a domain at a round number or a specific one?

It depends on whether you expect to negotiate. Domain Name Wire covered research showing that buyers who expect to haggle are more likely to engage with a round price, because a very specific number reads as the output of a calculation and therefore as final. So a round number suits a listing where you want offers and a conversation, while a specific number suits a fixed Buy Now price you want taken as stated. The same research suggests flipping once a negotiation is underway: specific counteroffers get argued with less. Either way, pick the format on purpose rather than defaulting to whatever the appraisal tool printed.

How often should I reprice a domain?

Review annually, at renewal, when the decision to keep paying is already in front of you. A name that has sat for a full renewal cycle with no inquiries is telling you something, and the three responses are to cut the price toward the liquid end of its comp range, move it to a venue whose buyers actually match it, or drop it. Resist repricing every few months out of impatience, because in an illiquid market a few months of silence is not evidence. Do reprice immediately if the comps move, if the extension's demand shifts, or if you discover the name is worth more than you first thought.

How to Price a Domain for Sale So It Actually Sells

How to price a domain for sale using comps, a holding-cost floor and a walk-away number. A 20-year investor's pricing worksheet, price bands, and when to reprice.

Price a domain from four numbers, in this order: the comp range that similar names actually sold for, a floor built from what the name has cost you to own, an asking price set in the upper half of that comp range, and a walk-away figure you decide before any buyer contacts you. What you paid for the name is not one of the four. The single most common pricing mistake is starting from your own cost and working upward, which produces a number the market has no reason to respect and a listing that sits for years while renewals quietly eat the margin. Here is the whole process, including the arithmetic.

I have been buying and selling domains for more than twenty years, and pricing is where I see good names go to die. Not bad names. Good ones, bought well, priced by somebody who never wrote down what they would actually accept. A domain is an illiquid asset with a small buyer pool and an annual bill attached to it. Pricing it is not an act of optimism. It is a decision about which buyer you want and how long you can afford to wait for them.

Why does your price have to start from comps?

Because comparable sales are the only input in this business that records what somebody actually paid. Every other number on offer is an estimate. An automated appraisal is a model’s guess, a forum opinion is a stranger’s guess, and your own sense of what the name is worth is the least reliable of the three, because you own it.

A comp set does not have to be large to be useful. Three to five sales of names with the same length, the same pattern and the same extension, inside the last year or two, will give you a band that is tight enough to price against. The work is in the matching, not the volume. A two-word .com sale tells you almost nothing about a five-letter brandable, and a sale from a market three years ago tells you about a market three years ago. My full process for narrowing a search down to the handful of sales that matter is in reading domain sales comps, and the factors that put a name in one band rather than another are in how to value a domain name.

One honest caveat, because it changes how you read the range. Public comp databases record reported sales, which skews toward names that sold. You never see the identical name that sat unsold at the same price for four years. So a comp range tells you what a successful sale looked like, not how likely a sale is. Treat it as the ceiling of reasonable, not as a forecast.

What is the sunk-cost trap in domain pricing?

It is pricing upward from what the name cost you, and it is the default behavior of almost every new seller. You paid $340 at auction, so you want $3,400. You hand registered it for $12, so you list it at $299. The multiple feels principled. It is arbitrary. The market did not agree to buy your name at a markup on your purchase, and it has no mechanism for making you whole.

The trap costs money in both directions, which is the part people miss. A name you bought badly gets priced above its comps and never sells, while you keep renewing it because selling at a loss feels like an admission. A name you bought brilliantly gets priced at a multiple of a tiny cost and sells instantly for a fraction of what it was worth, which feels like a win right up until you see the comps. Both errors come from the same habit of treating your own cost as information about the name.

The fix is mechanical. Price the name as if it had arrived in your account by accident and you had no idea what it cost. Your purchase price has exactly one legitimate job in this process, and it appears in the next section: it is an input to the floor, which is a stopping rule, not a price.

What does it actually cost you to hold a domain?

More than the renewal, and for longer than you think. The renewal itself is the visible part. Verisign’s wholesale .com price was frozen at $7.85 for years, then rose every September from 2021, reaching $10.26 in September 2024, while registrar list prices ran higher still, as Domain Name Wire documented in its breakdown of how registrars have increased .com prices. Call a .com somewhere in the low teens to low twenties a year depending on where you hold it, and assume it drifts upward, because it has every year since the freeze ended.

The number that actually matters is renewal multiplied by the years you will genuinely wait. This is where most floors are set far too low, because sellers imagine a two-year hold. Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire publishes his own portfolio results, and in his mid-2024 review of a 2,500-name portfolio he reported 17 sales in the first half of the year, an annualized sell-through rate of 1.36%, against 1.96% the year before. His assessment was that 1% to 2% is considered solid for a passive portfolio like his.

Sit with that for a second, because it reframes the whole exercise. At a 1% to 2% annual sell-through, the typical listed name is not waiting months. It is waiting years, and a good share of any portfolio never sells at all. So a floor built on two years of renewals is fiction. Build it on the hold you will realistically accept, and add the commission, because the venue takes its cut at the end. Namecheap’s own knowledge base article on listing a domain for sale states a flat 10% commission per Market transaction, with listings accepted from $5 up to $1,000,000. The full listing flow is in how to list a domain on Namecheap Market.

The worksheet: comp, floor, ask, walk-away

This is the sheet I run on every name before it goes live. It takes about ten minutes and it produces four numbers, of which only one ever gets published:

Step	What it is	How to get it	The mistake
1. The comp range	The band that recent sales of genuinely similar names actually cleared.	Pull three to five sales matched on length, pattern, extension and style, from the last 12 to 24 months. Ignore the record at the top; it is the one everybody quotes and nobody repeats.	Treating one spectacular sale as the range. A single comp is an anecdote, and pricing off it is how a name sits for a decade.
2. The floor	The number below which selling is worse than holding, built from cost, not from hope.	Acquisition cost, plus the renewals you expect to pay before a realistic sale, plus the venue commission you will lose at checkout. That total is the floor.	Confusing the floor with the value. The floor only tells you when to stop; it never tells you what the name is worth.
3. The ask	The published price, set in the upper half of the comp range.	Take the comp cluster, move toward its top for a cleaner name and toward its middle for a common one, then add the room you want for a negotiation if the venue allows one.	Pricing at the very top of the range on every name you own. If every listing is priced like an outlier, none of them look credible.
4. The walk-away	The lowest offer you will accept today, decided before anyone makes one.	Sit it above the floor and well below the ask, and write it down. It is the number that keeps a real offer from feeling like an insult.	Deciding it while a buyer waits. An offer you did not plan for gets answered with emotion, and emotion is expensive in both directions.

Here is the arithmetic on one name so the shape is concrete. The figures below are illustrative, chosen to show how the four numbers relate to each other. They are not sales I am reporting:

Comp range. Four recent sales of similar two-word .com names cluster between $1,800 and $3,200. A fifth sold for $14,000 and is discarded as an outlier.
Floor. Bought at auction for $180. Eight years of renewals at about $15 is $120. Total cost to that point is $300. At a 10% commission, a $340 sale nets roughly $306, so the floor sits near $340.
Ask. The name is clean and pronounceable, so the ask goes to the upper half of the comp range at $2,988, which nets about $2,689 after commission.
Walk-away. $1,750, decided now. Above the floor by a wide margin, below the ask by enough to close a real negotiation, and written down so a Tuesday morning offer does not get answered on instinct.

Notice how far apart the floor and the walk-away are. That gap is deliberate. The floor is the point at which holding beats selling, and you should almost never transact there. The walk-away is a business decision about what a fair sale looks like today. Collapsing the two is how sellers talk themselves into accepting $400 for a name whose comps say $2,000, on the grounds that they are still technically ahead.

What does each price band attract?

A price is not just a number, it is a filter on who shows up. Once your comps have given you a range, look at which band the range lands in and ask whether that buyer actually exists for your name:

Band	Who is buying	What to expect
Under $500	A freelancer, a side project, a small business naming something this week.	The most liquid band there is, and the one where a visible price does nearly all the work. Buyers here have a dozen near substitutes open in other tabs.
$500 to $2,500	A funded side project or a small company with a real budget line.	Still largely an impulse purchase, but the buyer will now compare the name against building on a longer alternative. The comps have to genuinely support the number.
$2,500 to $15,000	A company with a naming decision already made, or an investor who thinks you are underpriced.	Expect a conversation even on a fixed price. Sales here are slower and far rarer, and the buyer usually needs to justify the spend to somebody else.
Above $15,000	A specific company for whom this exact name solves a specific problem.	You are not running a listing any more, you are waiting for one buyer. That is a legitimate plan only on a name you can comfortably hold for years.

The practical test is the one sellers skip: name the company that would pay your asking price. Not a category, a company. If you can picture three of them, the band is right. If you cannot picture one, you have priced into a band your name does not belong in, and no amount of patience fixes that. Whether the number is published as a fixed price or held behind an offer form is a separate decision, and I work through it band by band in Buy Now versus Make Offer.

Should the number be round or specific?

This is a small decision with a real effect, and it is the one piece of pricing where there is actual research to lean on. Domain Name Wire covered a 2018 paper on how asking prices affect negotiation, and the finding is counterintuitive: when people expect to haggle, they are more likely to engage with a round price than with a slightly lower specific one. A precise number reads as the output of a calculation, so it reads as final, and a buyer who wanted a negotiation goes elsewhere.

That gives a clean rule. If you want the price taken as stated and paid, make it specific, which is why the worked example above asks $2,988 rather than $3,000. If you want offers and a conversation, especially on a higher-priced name, use the round number and invite the negotiation you were going to have anyway. The same research suggests inverting it once you are in the conversation: specific counteroffers get argued with less than round ones.

One more thing worth knowing before you agonize over the last two digits. The price you set is not always the price a buyer sees. Domain Name Wire found in 2022 that some registrar partners add margin to syndicated listings, and that Google’s own domain checkout rounded listed prices up to the next $50 at the time. Those specific figures are from 2022 and the partners have shifted since, but the principle holds: once a listing travels through a distribution network, the precision you engineered can get sanded off at the far end.

When should you reprice a domain?

At renewal, and mostly only at renewal. The bill forces the question anyway, and a full year of data is enough to draw a conclusion from where a few months of silence is not. When the invoice arrives, a name with no inquiries has three honest paths:

Cut toward the liquid end of the comp range. If the comps ran $1,800 to $3,200 and you asked $2,988, a year of silence is an argument for $1,950, not for $2,900.
Move it, do not just mark it down. Sometimes the price was fine and the audience was wrong. A name aimed at a niche the venue does not serve will sit at any price. Where to sell domains covers which venues suit which inventory.
Drop it. The hardest one, and usually the correct one after several renewals with no contact at all. A renewal you pay out of stubbornness is a purchase you are making again, at full price, of a name you already know nobody wants. Deciding this in advance is part of a portfolio strategy.

Reprice immediately, outside that cycle, only when something real changes: fresh comps that move the range, a shift in demand for the extension, or a discovery about the name that you missed when you bought it.

What sets your price before you ever list?

The acquisition. Every number in the worksheet above is downstream of what you bought and what you paid, and no pricing discipline rescues a name that was never worth its comps. A name bought below its range can carry a fair asking price and still return well. A name bought above it leaves you choosing between a loss and a decade of renewals. That is the buy-side decision, and the discipline that governs it is a maximum bid, which I cover separately in setting a maximum bid. Do not confuse the two numbers: a max bid is what you refuse to pay, an asking price is what you hope to receive.

That buying side is the problem I built PounceDomains to solve. It watches the Namecheap Market auction and closeout feed around the clock, scores every ending-soon match against configs you define, and enriches each one with comparable sales, backlink data and a suggested maximum bid, so the valuation work happens before the batch closes rather than after you have won. It is Namecheap-only and it does not sell names for you. What it changes is the number you start from, which is the number every listing decision later depends on. You can start a free account and have a config running in a few minutes. The whole acquire, hold and sell loop is laid out in how to make money flipping domains.

So what should you price your domain at?

Pull the comps, build a floor from real holding costs over a realistic hold, ask in the upper half of the comp range, and fix a walk-away before a buyer ever writes to you. Make the number specific if you want it paid and round if you want it negotiated. Review at renewal, and be willing to cut, move or drop. None of this makes a name more valuable. What it does is stop you from doing the two things that quietly cost investors the most money: pricing from your own costs, and deciding what you will accept while somebody is waiting for an answer.