I discovered yesterday that the domain name I want has been taken and that GoDaddy can “Help me get it” for about £59 as some kind of brokerage fee or I can pay, according to other sites £23,000+ or even £52,000+ for it which just isn’t going to happen. The thing is, I’m still building my app but I’m using SendGrid to send fancy emails to customers and, I believe, I need a registered domain name so that the emails actually send. So should I
A) Pay some sort of “brokerage fee” to Go Daddy
B) Change the name of my app to something else and get a different domain name if I can come up with one.
C) Not worry about it because very few people actually type in www.domain.com any more
D) Register a really cheap, pants Domain name and just use that for testing purposes and risk any knock on effect that changing it further down the line might have in future.
E) Something else.
Domain names and all that are not something I’ve ever had exposure to before so I’d welcome any direction.
The brokerage fee doesn’t include the cost of the domain. Just get the .app or .io or .co or .anything version if it’s super important to keep the name. You don’t want to hinge an entire business on a domain name, that’s focusing on the wrong thing.
Best bet, you can place a backorder on it, and see if whoever owns it lets it expire.
The way a lot of companies work around the whole “domain isn’t available” situation is by adding something in front of the domain like “get” or adding something like “crm” or “app” to the end of their desired domain. Just get creative. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
@nick27 - That’s super helpful. Thank you.
Happily my AppName is a variable in the app so it’s no biggy to change it throughout. As a follow on from your suggestion…Is there a more successful addition to a domain so if I have, for instance, MyDomain.Co and it’s taken, would My-Domain.co be better over MyDomainApp.co or does it really hardly matter?
Honestly, I always use “.app” domains on all of my apps. My staging server is called mystaging.app. I own around 40 “.app” domains. They just make sense if you’re building apps. Tech companies typically use “.io” (ie. Bubble.io). The .co domains are good for establishing a company or brand, but people often misread them as .com, so that could be a point of friction to consider.
Not to be too long-winded, but if you’re building apps, just go with the .app TLD. It looks sharp, it’s easy to remember, and it’s gaining in popularity, so it’s more widely recognized (similar to .org or .net TLDs).
Not to contradict everything I said in my last comment, but the mydomainapp.com would probably be my first choice, depending on how long the brand name before the word “app” is. Keeping your domain length as short as possible is always the best bet.
