Catch expiring domains the moment they drop — at registration price.

Drop catching is registering a domain the instant it's deleted from the registry and released back to the public pool. When an owner lets a name lapse, it walks through a fixed lifecycle — grace period, redemption, then pending delete — before it finally drops and becomes available to register again at the standard price. Drop catching targets that exact moment so you land the name for a registration fee instead of buying it in an auction.

Pending delete is the last stage before a domain drops. After the grace and redemption periods pass without renewal, gTLDs enter a fixed ~5-day pending-delete window (the ICANN standard) where nobody — not even the former owner — can recover the name. When that window ends, the registry deletes the domain and it becomes available to register. PounceDomains watches names through pending delete and re-checks availability frequently as the drop approaches.

No. PounceDrops registers a dropped name through your own Namecheap account at Namecheap's standard registration price — there's no $27–60 backorder fee and no auction premium on top. Drop catching itself is included with the PounceDomains Elite plan (and every new account's 14-day trial); the only cost to acquire a name is the registration fee you'd pay Namecheap anyway.

Honestly, usually not. For a heavily contested premium .com that dozens of investors are chasing, dedicated catch networks fire thousands of registration requests per second across hundreds of registrar connections — odds you can't replicate through a single Namecheap account. Use those services for the trophy names. PounceDomains is built to win the daily long tail: the thousands of good expired domains that quietly drop with nobody racing for them, at registration price, and to tell you which of those are actually worth catching.

You add a name to your drop watchlist. PounceDomains monitors its availability via RDAP every 2 minutes through the delete lifecycle, and the moment the name becomes registerable, PounceDrops submits the registration through your own connected Namecheap account at the standard price. Premium-tier names are never auto-registered — if a drop comes back flagged as a premium registration with a higher price, we alert you to decide rather than spending on your behalf.

Yes — and it's a bonus most drop catchers don't offer. Beyond the NameJet and pending-delete lists you bring, PounceDomains builds its own daily list of dropping .dev and .app names by diffing the registry zone files (via ICANN CZDS), confirming pending delete over RDAP, and quality-filtering the rest — then feeds it into the same AI valuation and watch pipeline. ExpiredDomains.net, DropCatch and SnapNames don't surface a real pending-delete list for these Google TLDs; we do, because we go straight to the source.

Drop catching works with the TLDs your Namecheap account can register, and it's most reliable for gTLDs that follow the standard ICANN delete lifecycle — .com, .net, .org and most new gTLDs — where the pending-delete window and drop timing are predictable. Some country-code TLDs use their own delete schedules, so timing there is best-effort.

Drop catching through PounceDrops is an Elite-exclusive perk of PounceDomains — there's no separate purchase. Every new account's 14-day free trial includes PounceDrops too, so you can try it before upgrading: sign up, connect your Namecheap API key, and you can start watching names for the drop right away.