An industry appraisal, not an in-house guess.
Every namehaggle report answers one question: at this asking price, should I buy this domain? We answer it the way the domain industry actually values names — grounded in 2024–2026 practice from GoDaddy GoValue, Estibot, NameBio, the GGRG Liquid Market Reports, and DNJournal — not a simplified scorecard.
Three valuation approaches.
The engine selects and blends by domain type — the same three approaches a professional appraiser uses:
- Comparable-sales (comps) — the backbone. Recent sales matched by same TLD + category/pattern + length + keyword class, recency-weighted (12–24 mo), median not mean, outliers dropped. Sources: NameBio, DNJournal.
- Category-anchored AVM — for liquid categories, price is anchored to published market floors/medians (GGRG), not guessed. Mirrors GoValue's three-number output (wholesale / market / list). For keyword names, value ∝ search volume × CPC × commercial intent (the Estibot lens).
- Income / traffic — only for developed domains with real traffic/revenue (a multiple of earnings). Most inventory is undeveloped, so asset value dominates.
Liquid-market tiers + TLD segments.
Liquid categories anchor to GGRG's 5th-percentile floor (our hard lower bound) and median (typical liquid retail):
Each TLD is its own comp pool. We bridge with a reference multiplier against the universally-liquid .com:
Three tiers: wholesale / market / list.
Every valuation is a range, mirroring GoValue's three numbers. Low = wholesale (investor-to-investor, ≈40–60% of market). Mid = market (typical retail / median). High = list / end-user (≈2–5× wholesale).
Offer math — reseller economics
The suggested offer is wholesale-anchored: you're buying to resell, so you pay the wholesale end, not retail.
net = resale·(1 − commission) − acquisition − hold. Venue and commission (Afternic/Sedo ~15%, Dan ~9%) are folded into the exit table.Auction mode
In auction mode the engine computes a disciplined max bid — the wholesale ceiling net of auction fees + first-year renewal, downgraded by confidence — and tells you to BID, BID UP TO $X, or STOP. It never chases a bid past the point the flip math works.
The /10 is a quality index — not the price.
The score is a relative-quality signal presented alongside the comp-anchored money (exactly how AVMs show a quality grade next to a price). It does not drive the valuation. Five factors, weighted:
The legal / reputation gate runs first.
Before any name-quality math, an exact match to a famous registered trademark, an active blacklist hit, or an abusive-use history floors the value and forces NO BUY regardless of how good the name is.
Hard flags that force NO BUY
- Exact match to a famous mark — UDRP transfer risk + ACPA statutory damages of $1,000–$100,000 per domain.
- A registered mark in a class that overlaps the name's apparent niche (e.g. a finance word matching a fintech mark).
- Active listing on Google Web Risk, Spamhaus, or SURBL.
- Prior adult / gambling / abusive use detectable via Wayback.
Dictionary-word marks that are only risky in-class get a caution flag, not an automatic kill — defensible out of class.
Where every number comes from.
The shipping default runs fully offline at $0 on bundled, calibrated tables — the method is industry-standard; precision on a specific name improves once the live adapters are connected. Each live provider is gated behind its own key; no key means no network call and no spend.
Honest confidence, honest scope.
Automated appraisal is reliable on established .com keyword domains under ~$5k with real comps, and unreliable on brandables and new TLDs — and we say so. Confidence downgrades for thin comps, new/illiquid TLDs, coined names, and any legal caution.
- High — multiple same-TLD comps, liquid category, established sub-$5k range.
- Medium — some category comps or strong heuristic support.
- Low — brandable/coined, illiquid TLD, or no direct comps.
What we explicitly don't do:
- We don't broker, hold, or transact. Pure independent appraisal — that independence is the moat.
- We don't give financial advice. Valuations are estimates from public data; the decision is yours.
- We don't predict prices. The high tier is a plausible ceiling, not a target — names can take years to find an end-user.
Every change, dated.
Each report carries a run ID and a methodology version, so a report stays reproducible even after the framework evolves.