Who it is for
For agencies sitting on client domains
Campaign domains, old brand variants and the names a client bought and never used. A page on each, one dashboard, mail left intact, and offers relayed so nobody's address is handed out.
Updated · Tom Reitsma, Triton IT
The problem, stated plainly
Agencies accumulate domains. Campaign names that ran for six weeks, brand
variants bought defensively, the .io a client insisted on and never
launched, the domain from the project that got cancelled. They renew
annually, forever, and nobody wants to be the person who let one lapse.
Selling them is a small job that never reaches the top of anyone’s list, because the options have been a marketplace that takes a fifth of the sale and puts its own brand on the client’s name, or a parking page with ads on it, which is not something you want to explain to a client.
What a page on each domain looks like
The domain resolves to a single HTML document with the name, a price or a make-offer form, and nothing else: no ads, no redirect to a marketplace, no third-party scripts, no links off to anyone but us. Every visitor of a given domain gets exactly the same bytes, which is both a promise to the client and the reason the page does not look like cloaking to a scanner.
The parts that matter for an agency
- One account, many domains. Add them one at a time or paste a list.
- Mail survives. Delegating usually means losing MX. Here the records come with you and stay editable, so a client’s Google Workspace, SPF and verification records keep working.
- Nobody’s address is exposed. Offers arrive as a thread. Both sides reply through nics.dev, and neither learns the other’s email address unless they choose to share it.
- Stats you can put in a report. Visits are classified human or bot before they are counted, with the referrer split and country, per domain.
- A weekly digest across the whole portfolio, and alerts when a domain’s delegation drifts, a certificate gets stuck, or a name suddenly gets real human attention.
- A public portfolio page, if you want one, at a nics.dev address that lists the domains you have opted to show.
- Free while in beta. No card, no per-domain fee, no commission.
What it does not do
It does not hold money: a sale is handed to a third-party escrow service and we record the state. It does not syndicate a listing to registrar networks the way a marketplace does. There is no public API yet. If a client’s domain needs a shop window rather than a page, say so. A marketplace is the honest answer for that name.
Starting
Pick the five domains with the least defensible renewal, add them, point the
nameservers at ns1.nics.dev and ns2.nics.dev, and see what a month of
human visitor numbers tells you. The full setup is in the
docs, and the delegation is reversible within the hour.
Questions
Can I keep client domains separate?
Every domain is its own listing with its own page, price, language and stats. What is shared is the account they sit in and the weekly digest that summarises them.
Will delegating break the client's email?
No, as long as you carry the records over. MX and TXT records are copied into the zone we serve, and A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, SRV and CAA records stay editable in the portal.
Does the buyer see my address or the client's?
Neither. Every message in a thread is relayed from nics.dev with no reply-to, so the buyer answers on their own signed link and never learns the seller's address.
What does it cost per domain?
Nothing while nics.dev is in beta: no card, no per-domain fee and no commission on a sale.
Free while nics.dev is in beta
Point a domain's nameservers at ns1.nics.dev and ns2.nics.dev and it gets a clean page with a make-offer form. No card, no per-domain fee, no commission on a sale.