How to price a domain you want to sell

What actually determines a domain’s price?

Comparable sales. Every appraisal model worth anything, from the ones the big registrars run over their own sales corpora to the commercial tools built on public sales databases, is fundamentally a way of finding names like yours that sold, and looking at what they went for. Length, extension, dictionary words, search volume, advertiser competition and “brandability” are all attributes used to decide which past sales count as comparable, not values in themselves.

There is no open dataset of domain sales. The serious ones are commercial and access is discretionary; the free weekly top-sales lists are thin and biased towards the very top of the market. So most sellers are working from partial evidence, and should price accordingly.

Price a range, not a number

Give yourself a floor, a target and a walk-away, and put only the part you want the buyer to see on the page. An automated estimate is best read as a range with a confidence attached. A single figure implies a precision that does not exist in this market.

A practical way to build one:

1. Find three to five names that are genuinely similar (same extension, similar length, same kind of word) that have recorded sales.
2. Discount hard for anything yours lacks: a shorter name, a better extension, an existing brand behind it.
3. Set the floor at the number below which you would rather keep renewing it.
4. Set the target where you would be pleased, not where you would be amazed.

Should the price be on the page?

A visible buy-now price converts faster and it filters: people who were never going to pay it do not write to you. A make-offer form keeps the ceiling open, which matters for a name whose value depends entirely on who is asking, and a minimum offer keeps the tyre-kickers out. Most sellers end up with make-offer plus a floor, which is what a nics.dev page does by default.

Why traffic is a poor proxy

Type-in traffic has largely gone: browsers send address-bar input to search, and the residual hits on an unused domain are mostly automated. One network measured an average of a little over nine visitors a month per domain across its whole inventory, and independent research in December 2025 found that more than 90% of parked-domain visits redirect to malicious destinations, which is a good indication of who is doing the visiting.

That is why nics.dev classifies each visit as human or bot at request time rather than showing you a raw hit count. The useful signal is not the total: it is a week where a name gets far more human attention than usual, which is a reason to look again at the price.

What about appraisal tools?

Use them as one input. They are trained on sales corpora you cannot see, they cannot know that a company three timezones away has just picked your name for a product, and they cannot price the thing that actually sets the number in a private sale: how much the buyer wants it. nics.dev shows a market estimate in the portal, and a public estimate tool is on the way; the honest framing for any of them is “here is what similar names have done”, not “here is what this is worth”.

The one number you control

Your reserve. Decide before the first offer arrives what you will not go below, write it down, and let the thread do the rest. Negotiating on a page you own means there is no clock, no auction and nobody in the middle taking a percentage of the outcome.

Questions

What is the single most useful input to a price?

Comparable sales. Every serious appraisal model is built on a corpus of what similar names actually sold for; the rest of the attributes are ways of deciding which sales are comparable.

Should I show a price or ask for offers?

A visible price closes faster and filters out people who were never going to pay it; asking for offers keeps room to negotiate upward on a name you cannot price confidently. A make-offer form with a minimum offer is the middle ground most sellers settle on.

Does traffic tell me what a domain is worth?

Rarely. Type-in traffic collapsed once browsers started routing the address bar to search, most raw hits on a parked name are bots, and one network measured an average of a little over nine visitors a month per domain. Human visits are a signal about interest, not a valuation.

Does nics.dev tell me what my domain is worth?

The portal shows a market estimate per domain, and a public estimate tool is on the way. Treat any automated number, ours included, as one input next to comparable sales, not as a valuation.