2026-10-15

What .si domains actually sell for, and the five checks I run before buying one

297 tracked .si sales, a $2,678 median, and the checks that decide whether a Slovenian name is worth the renewal — including the free way to check comparables and availability.

Most ccTLD markets are invisible. A registry publishes a registration count once a year, two marketplaces report a handful of sales, and the rest is guesswork dressed up as instinct. Slovenia is a small country, so .si gets the worst of it: the names trade, but almost nobody writes down what they closed at.

I built a tool for this because I was tired of guessing, and the first thing it taught me is how little anyone actually knows about .si pricing. Here is the honest version of what the data says, and the checks I run before I spend money on a Slovenian name.

What the sales data actually shows

The tracker now holds 297 reported .si sales across ten venues, last refreshed on 15 October 2026. Of those, 51 rows are verified against a receipt or a venue's own published results; the rest are labelled reported, because a marketplace listing page is not proof of a close. Asking prices are never counted as sales, which sounds obvious until you notice how many "sold" lists on the internet are really asking prices that were quietly renamed.

The median tracked sale is $2,678. The average is $4,433, and the gap between those two numbers tells you more than either does alone: the average is dragged up by a small number of notable deals, with $50,000 at the top of the market. That shape — a low median, a long tail — is what a young, thin market looks like. It is not a sign that the extension is worthless. It is a sign that the middle of the market has not formed yet, which is exactly where a careful buyer can still find names at registrar prices.

The five checks, in the order I do them

Availability from the registry, not from a reseller. Every registrar's search box goes through its own cache, and a cache can be minutes or days behind. If a name looks free, confirm it against the registry's RDAP endpoint before you get attached to it. The reverse mistake is worse: a name showing as taken inside one dashboard while the registry says otherwise, which usually means a stale zone rather than a real registration.

Does the word already sell in other extensions? This is the cheapest demand test that exists. Take the exact word and look at whether the .com, .net, .io, .co, .de and .eu versions are registered and in use. One live company on word.com plus a parked word.si is a very different proposition from a word nobody took in any extension. I ran this at scale once — 8,916 common English words against ten extensions, 89,160 lookups — and the honest finding was that most words are taken everywhere, so the interesting names are the ones where the pattern breaks.

Comparables in .si, not in .com. A .com sale tells you what the word is worth to a buyer with a global audience. A .si sale tells you what a Slovenian buyer paid. Conflating them is how people end up asking $30,000 for a name that would sit for years. Pull the closest five or six .si comparables, by word shape and by category, and read the spread rather than the top number.

The economics of holding it. .si registrations are ordinary rather than premium on most names, roughly $11 to $30 a year depending on registrar, there is no local presence requirement, and renewal pricing is stable. That matters more than it sounds: a name you can hold for three years for the price of a dinner is a different bet from a $200-a-year ccTLD premium renewal.

Whether the buyer exists before you buy. This is the step most people skip. Pick the industry you think will want the name, then check that the industry is actually spending on domains in that market — companies with real websites, real hiring, real ad budgets. If you cannot name three plausible buyers, the name is a lottery ticket, not an investment.

How the appraisal works, and where it is weak

The score on any name report is built from six components: length and shape of the word, how easy it is to say and spell, whether it reads as a real word or a brandable string, how active the category is, how much the extension is moving, and what the closest comparables closed at. Those components roll up into five bands, and the report shows the range rather than a single magic number, because a single number would be a lie about how much data exists.

Where I do not trust it: genuinely short names (two or three characters), strings that are not words in any language, and thin categories where the comparables are three years old. In those cases the tool shows a wide range and says so, which is more useful than false precision. If a name has no real comparables, no scoring method on earth is going to invent them.

The tool itself

The whole thing runs at worthly.si. It is free and needs no account: you type a name and get registry-accurate availability, a value range with the comparables that produced it, and the sales table it draws from. If you build things, the same data is available as a JSON API — ten requests an hour on the free tier, no key required for the basics, and the pages on the site do not eat into your quota.

Two things I would ask of anyone who uses it. First, if you spot a sale in the table that is wrong, or a row that is an asking price rather than a close, tell me and it gets fixed — the tracker is only worth anything if it is honest, and a row is never silently rewritten after the fact. Second, if you disagree with a valuation, say so with a comparables argument rather than a number, and I will look at it again.

Small markets get priced by whoever bothers to write things down. That is the entire reason this exists.