The price of a domain is the renewal

You built the app, the site, the system. With AI, getting it live was fast. Then comes the part that seems small and stalls more people than they admit: picking the name and registering the domain.

It's not a lack of creativity. It's the fear of choosing wrong, and of overpaying without noticing.

Name and domain together

I think about the name and the domain in the same conversation. I don't come up with a brilliant name and then find out the .com is priced like a marketplace listing or the spelling is a maze.

The test I use is simple: the phone test. You say the name on a call. Can the person on the other end understand it and type it correctly? If they can't, the name isn't ready yet.

If the plan is to go beyond Brazil, the test has to pass in English too. DevPleno is my homegrown example: everyone gets "dev". "Pleno" in English turns into confusion. It works here. Abroad, it's friction.

The first-year trap

Marketplaces like GoDaddy (and Namecheap in the same spirit) sell you the thrill of a cheap domain in the first year. The renewal is another story.

In the video I show the price table: a first year that looks friendly, a renewal listed much higher, and in practice that week I still paid more than the table promised. Upsells at checkout. Extra services you didn't ask for. That's how "cheap" turns expensive.

The price that matters is what you pay every year to keep the address online. The first year is bait.

Where I actually buy

I keep my domains at Porkbun. A small margin on top of the base cost, transparent renewals, no pushing a protection bundle you didn't ask for. You need an international card. For me, that's fine.

Cloudflare Registrar and Vercel Domains follow the same logic: little or no aggressive markup on top of the registration price.

And there's a rule I follow: I keep where I register the domain separate from where I host. Domain at Porkbun, app on Vercel. Different card, clear invoices, freedom to switch one without dragging the other along.

When money is tight

If the budget is tight, I look for extensions that are cheaper to renew. At Porkbun, .de (Germany) shows up in that range: a very low first year and a renewal that's still small. I use a .de just to host public images, a sort of homemade CDN, with a subdomain per project on Vercel. One domain, several apps, fewer bills to renew.

It's not brand glamour. It's the math of someone who wants to ship things without bleeding on renewals.

Name ideas from expired domains

When I don't have a name, I don't sit there spinning synonyms in ChatGPT. I open Expired Domains, search for words from the niche (delivery, restaurant, whatever it is) and see what has expired.

Then I go to the Web Archive. I want to see what used to run at that address. If it was spam, phishing or junk, I skip it. If it fits the market, I look at backlinks: how many links point there, and whether they come from the niche or from SEO garbage.

An expired domain with good backlinks inside your market is a door to traffic. With rotten backlinks, it's an inherited problem. Semrush or Ahrefs help you tell the two apart. Don't buy just because of a big number in the column.

Why I buy so many domains

I buy a domain almost every week. It's not a collection. It's a trigger.

Seeing the domain pointing to my own service (Selva.run) pushes me to ship. It gets the project out of the drawer. It lets me test an idea quickly without obsessing over the perfect forever name.

The price of a domain isn't the first-year banner. It's the renewal. Research ideas in one place, buy in another, and only settle on a name if it survives a phone call.

In short

Think about the name and the domain together. Do the phone test (in Portuguese and, if it applies, in English). Be suspicious of the cheap first year on marketplaces.

Research availability and ideas on Expired Domains (and, if you want, on GoDaddy's search just to check). Buy at Porkbun, Cloudflare or Vercel. Keep registration separate from hosting. If money is tight, look for extensions that are cheap to renew and share whatever can be shared.

The right domain isn't the prettiest one on the slide. It's the one someone types correctly after hearing it, and the one you can renew every year without getting angry.

---

Watch the full video at Stop overpaying for your app's domain (in Portuguese). There I show GoDaddy vs Porkbun on screen, the phone test, .de for when money is tight, Expired Domains + Web Archive, and why I buy domains to get projects unstuck.