Sedo alternative: a for-sale page you own

What is Sedo, and what is happening to it?

Sedo is the largest European domain marketplace, around 22 million listings, with parking, for-sale landers and the SedoMLS distribution network. It is owned by IONOS in Germany. In November 2025 IONOS put it up for sale after parking revenue fell 66%, with a target of the third quarter of 2026.

That is not a shutdown, and this page is not going to pretend it is. But it is a good reason to know where else your domains could live, and to notice that a marketplace listing is not the same thing as a page you control.

What does Sedo do well?

Scale, and the boring engineering that comes with it. Sedo issues a real certificate on the customer’s own domain (measured as a roughly 90-day DigiCert DV certificate) instead of bouncing buyers to a marketplace URL, which is more than one of its larger competitors does. SedoMLS puts a listing in front of buyers who never visit the domain. It has been doing this for long enough that the transfer side is routine.

Where does having your own page differ?

Three places. The commission, which our research recorded at 10%, 15% or 20% depending on the sale. The page, which is Sedo’s rather than yours: the buyer’s first impression is a marketplace listing, and the conversation happens on their platform. And the statistics: Sedo reports unique views and offer views, finalised after 48 hours, with no visibility into how much of it was a bot. Community consensus across the whole trade is that bot filtering on sales landers is poor everywhere, which is a low bar to be visibly better than.

How does nics.dev compare with Sedo?

	Sedo	nics.dev
Commission	10% / 15% / 20% by tier	None while in beta
Ads on the lander	Parking is part of the product	None, ever
Who owns the buyer relationship	The marketplace	You. Offers arrive as a thread on your own page, relayed so your address stays private
Whose page the buyer lands on	Sedo’s lander on your domain	Yours: your name, your price, your language, no marketplace chrome
HTTPS on your domain	Real certificate on the customer domain (~90-day DigiCert DV)	Free certificate per domain and its www name, issued automatically after delegation
EU hosting and GDPR	German operator	EU-hosted; visitor IPs hashed with a daily salt, no cookies on landers
Escrow / held funds	Marketplace transfer service	Not held by us, ever. The deal is handed to a third-party escrow service and we record the state
Syndication	SedoMLS	Not yet. No distribution network
Visitor stats	Unique views and offer views, finalised after 48 hours	Per-domain, classified human versus bot, with the referrer split and country
Ownership	Business up for sale since November 2025	Independent; free while in beta

How do I move some of a portfolio over in an afternoon?

1. Export your list from Sedo, or take it from your registrar.
2. Add the domains in the portal, one at a time or as a pasted list.
3. Point the nameservers at ns1.nics.dev and ns2.nics.dev for the domains you want on your own pages. Leave the rest where they are. This is a per-domain decision, not an account-level one.
4. Wait for the check. We resolve the parent nameservers every few minutes; when they show our two names the page goes live and a certificate is issued.
5. Keep your mail. MX and TXT records are copied into the zone we serve, and stay editable in the portal.

What nics.dev does not do

No syndication, no buyer-side search, no auctions, no lease-to-own, no held funds. If your domain sells on Sedo because Sedo’s buyers find it there, moving it to a page on the domain itself takes that away. Split the portfolio instead of arguing over which tool wins.

Questions

Is Sedo shutting down?

Not as far as anyone has announced. IONOS put the Sedo business up for sale in November 2025 after parking revenue fell 66%, with a target of the third quarter of 2026. Who buys it, and what they do with it, was unknown when this page was written.

What does Sedo charge?

Our research recorded commission tiers of 10%, 15% and 20% depending on the sale. nics.dev takes no commission while it is in beta.

Can I list on Sedo and use a nics.dev page at the same time?

Not on the same domain, because a domain has one set of nameservers and they decide which page a visitor sees. You can split a portfolio: some domains on a marketplace, some on your own pages.

Does nics.dev syndicate my domain the way SedoMLS does?

No. There is no distribution network behind nics.dev and no plan to become a marketplace. What you get is a page on the domain itself, plus whatever traffic the name already has.