Ask HN: Whats the most you've paid for a Domain Name?
Was it worth it and would you do it again? What are your thoughts on spending a small fortunate to get your .com? We paid $12 for the .co and lost tons of business from potential customers trying to email us at the .com. We finally caved and paid $9,000 for the .com. It's been 100% worth it for our business to have the .com. Do you think the loss of business was partially because your company chose .co instead of something else like .io? I could see myself mistaking .co with .com but not .io. $5000. Use a domain broker like sedo.com to negotiate so the seller doesn't know who you are and how significant the domain name is to you. Bought several sub-$2000 domains this way. Don't assume that the broker can find the domain owner if it's a years-old registration. I had to pay $1000 to a squatter to get my own personal name. The problem is that it is an emotional topic for sellers. Most sellers think that their domain is worth 4 figures or more at the least while it may not be the case often. I have found many squatted domains that I will happily pay say $200 give or take but I am shelling out $5000 for a domain name (unless I have free VC money to burn :)) Ultimately, I end up buying a domain that is not taken and live with that. Most expensive, $8,500. Not sure if it was worth it yet, time will tell. I would certainly pay lots for a domain though again. I bought and sold them as a business, I'm comfortable with paying a premium for a good domain. getting the domain of my dreams would involve like bribing an entire country and that's money i can spend in better ways. i think it depends on the projected ROI. the most expensive for me was an io domain for 80€/year, though. wrong purchase. $50K for a company I was working for. It's a 7 letter english word, animal, and was the brand for an ecommerce company that was shutting down but had a lot of history behind it. Not that much, it was about 15 Euro IIRC.
I'd need a damn good reason to spend more than $50 on one. And though there are many good reasons, none of them have applied to me so far. :-) One of the reason it's worth it is because Google still prefers .com a lot. $2,500 and would not do it again. Why not? I'm guessing the domain doesn't bring customers. Your product brings the customers. I paid $45 for give.pizza. ;) Why? As an investment? I spend $99/year for mohni.sh (my first name - Mohnish) $700 for supermathworld.com from a squatter Being a geek, I would have pre-registered the .net, .org and .com for many variations of any business I might start up, so there would be no need to pay a lot. I've seen people shaken down due to lack of hind-sight. I would pay a lot to buy .org and .com (the TLD's themselves) but they won't sell them to me.