2026-09-26

The nine checks I run before I pay for a domain — now free tools

Every check I run before buying a name — brandability, portfolio overlap, availability at the registry, age and history, typos, flip maths and listing copy — is now a free tool at dnwai.com/tools. Here is what each one is for, and what none of them can tell you.

I have bought names I should not have bought. Not because the price was wrong — because I skipped a check that takes ninety seconds and costs nothing.

Almost every mistake I made had the same shape: I liked the name, so I looked for reasons it was fine. The checks below are the ones that stop that. I have just packaged all of them as free tools at dnwai.com/tools, and this post is what each one is actually for — including the parts they cannot do for you.

1. Brandability before beauty

The first pass is mechanical: is the name easy to say once and easy to spell after hearing it? A brandability score will not pick a name for you, but it does catch the name you love that nobody can repeat back to you over a phone call. Run the candidates through it before you fall in love, not after.

2. Portfolio overlap

If you own thirty names, the real risk is buying the thirty-first that does the same job as three you already have. Paste your whole list into the bulk portfolio analyzer and look for pairs that sound like siblings. Two names that mean the same thing to a buyer means you paid twice for one idea.

3. Availability at the registry, not at your registrar

Search boxes lie in both directions: they suggest 'premium' pricing for names that are free, and they show 'available' for names that are not. A live registry lookup through the official data tells you what is actually registered, and a bulk check lets you test a whole brainstorm in one run instead of forty browser tabs.

4. Age and history

An old registration is not automatically an asset. What matters is what happened to it: registrar moves, expiry lapses, status flags, and whether the first archive snapshot shows a real website or a parking page that has been sitting still since 2011. This is the check that separates 'aged' from 'abandoned'.

5. Typos and variants

Before you buy, check what a careless buyer would type. If the misspelling lands on an active competitor, every email you send sends a little traffic their way. The typo finder gives you the realistic set — dropped letters, doubled letters, swapped vowels — plus the obvious TLD variants so you can see how much of your brand you do not own.

6. Flip maths

Buy at one price, sell at another, and the gap looks like profit until you subtract the hold years, the renewals, the escrow fees and the platform commission. The ROI calculator exists to make that subtraction obvious before you commit, not after.

7. Listing and outreach copy

A name fails to sell more often because of the listing than the name. A one-line description that says what the buyer could build with it beats three paragraphs about how memorable it is. The listing tool generates both the marketplace text and a short outreach email you can actually send.

8. Availability sweeps, properly paced

When you are digging through a shortlist of sixty names, the only thing that matters is speed and honesty: which of these are open right now. A sweep does that in one pass, and anything that fails to answer is refunded rather than silently reported as available.

9. A for-sale page for the names you already own

Most sellers lose buyers in the gap between interest and a live page. Build a one-page offer with the name, the price, and a contact route — a page you can link from a forum signature or a cold email instead of 'message me for details'.

What the tools cannot do

None of them will tell you whether a name is worth buying, because that depends on what you plan to build and who you plan to sell to. None of them replace a trademark search in the jurisdictions you actually sell in. And no score, mine or anyone else's, should overrule the plain fact that you would be embarrassed to say the name out loud.

How to use them

The eight analysis tools are free without an account. The live registry lookups — availability sweeps and age and history reports — cost credits, because each one is a real query against real data: a free account starts you with ten of them, and packs start at nine dollars with no subscription. When a lookup fails, the credit comes back automatically.

There is nothing to install and no email wall in front of the free ones. If you are in the middle of a shortlist right now, start with the bulk portfolio analyzer and the availability sweep, and let the rest wait until you have two candidates instead of twenty.