For indie hackers with dead side projects

The domain outlived the project

You registered it in an evening, built the thing, shipped it or did not, and moved on. It has been renewing ever since. Deleting it feels wasteful, listing it on a marketplace means handing a fifth of any sale to somebody else, and parking it means putting ads on a name with your handle attached to it.

What nics.dev does with it

Point the domain’s nameservers at ns1.nics.dev and ns2.nics.dev, and the name serves one page: what it is, a price or a make-offer form, and a way to reach you. One HTML document with one inline stylesheet. No ads, no redirects, no third-party scripts, no cookies, no consent banner. The same bytes for a buyer, a crawler and a bot.

An offer opens a thread. You reply from the portal, the buyer replies from a signed link in their email, and neither of you sees the other’s address until you decide to share it. When you agree a price, the thread hands off to a third-party escrow service and shows the transfer checklist for that extension. nics.dev never touches the money.

Why this rather than a marketplace

• You keep the domain. No transfer, no registrar switch, no authorization code. It is a nameserver change and it is reversible.
• You keep the buyer. The conversation is yours from the first message.
• You keep the price. No commission while nics.dev is in beta.
• Your mail keeps working. The MX and TXT records come with you.
• Honest numbers. Visits are classified human or bot before you see them, so ten real visitors reads as ten, not as four hundred crawler hits.
• Three languages. A page can render in English, Dutch or German, set per domain, identical for everyone who visits it.

What it does not do

No syndication to registrar networks, so nobody is going to stumble across your name in a marketplace search. No held funds. No lease-to-own. No public API yet. If the name is generic enough that its buyers only exist in a marketplace, list it in a marketplace.

Starting

Add the domain, point the nameservers, wait a few minutes for the delegation check, and the page is live with its own certificate. The detail is in the docs; pricing is free while in beta, and pointing the nameservers back at your host undoes all of it.

Questions

Do I have to give up the domain to list it?

No. It stays in your registrar account, in your name, on your card. You change its nameserver records and that is the entire handover. You can change them back within the hour.

What if I want to relaunch the project later?

Point the nameservers back at your host. Nothing else changed: no transfer, no registrar switch, no authorization code was ever issued.

Can I keep the email address on it?

Yes. MX and TXT records are copied into the zone we serve, and you can edit A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, SRV and CAA records in the portal at any time.

What does it cost?

Nothing while nics.dev is in beta: no card, no per-domain fee, no commission when a domain sells.