Never bid above a name's Est. value

Est. value is the price you sell at

Est. value is a model's estimate of what the name could sell for. It is never an offer, and never a price anyone has paid. Under Value in the drawer, Similar sales sits beside it. Similar sales shows the count and the median of past sales of names like this one, in the sales we track.

That median is the middle of what buyers paid for names like yours, and many of those buyers are companies that will use the name. When you resell, you sell at that same middle price. So the model's figure and the median are two readings of one price. It is the price at the end of your trade, not the price at its start.

If you bid Est. value, you buy the name at the price you hope to sell it for. In Browse, Est. profitEst. profitThe gap between a name’s estimated value and its price today, before fees.Read the definition is Est. value's gain over the price today, in percent, before fees. At an auction the bid is the price, so a bid at Est. value reads as zero profit, and that is before commission, renewalsRenewalThe yearly fee that keeps a domain yours. You pay it for as long as you hold the name, and on some endings it costs far more than the first year did.Read the definition and years of waiting. Est. value marks the top of the range.

Your maximum comes from your resale math

An investor who resells needs to sell at a large multiple of the buying price. Andrew Allemann's own target, given on Domain Name Wire on 27 April 2023, is ten times the purchase price when selling a name bought around $2,000, and much more on cheaper names.

The multiple exists because most names never sell. For years, Allemann won expired names for about $100 to $200 and resold them for $2,000 to $5,000 (Domain Name Wire, 2 March 2021). By 2021 such names closed at $300 to $800. Given sell-through ratesSell-through rateThe share of the names somebody holds that sell in a year. Two names sold out of a hundred held is a rate of 2%.Read the definition, meaning the share of a portfolio that sells in a year, Allemann found the math hard to make work and had to adjust.

So you work the arithmetic backward, starting from the median. In the sales we track, the 12-month median on .com is $810, and the count of those sales is 28,214. By Allemann's target, a name you expect to sell at that median is worth about a tenth of the median to you at auction. On a cheap name, it is worth less than that.

Then subtract the cost of waiting. The yearly renewal of .com across the registrarsRegistrarThe company you buy and renew a domain through, such as Namecheap or GoDaddy. It does not own the name, it only registers it for you.Read the definition we price is $13.40, and you pay it every year the name sits unsold. Subtract the commission the marketplaceMarketplaceA site where owners list domains for sale and buyers make offers, such as Sedo or Afternic.Read the definition takes on the sale as well. What is left is the figure you give the venue.

The price is made in the last minutes

An auction's deadline is not fixed. GoDaddy's own help page on bidding, read in 2026, says three things. Bids in the final moments may extend the auction. A proxy bidProxy bidThe most you tell an auction you will pay. The venue then bids for you in small steps, only as high as it needs to keep you in front.Read the definition is binding and cannot be cancelled. The winner pays within 48 hours. A proxy bid is your maximum: you give it to the venue, and the venue bids for you, one step at a time.

Most venues extend the deadline. When someone bids in the last few minutes, most auction services extend the end time, as Allemann wrote on Domain Name Wire on 5 October 2022. So an auction can run for hours, and the other bidder is sometimes a bot more patient than you. In Allemann's words, it is a war of attrition.

Because each step is small, the extensions are many. In a DropCatch auction for reactive.com with over 350 bids, described by Allemann on Domain Name Wire on 25 October 2022, each $50 raise above $135,000 reset the clock to five minutes. That auction closed in 2022 at $168,450.

Elliot Silver described, on DomainInvesting on 6 February 2010, a SnapNames auction for FitnessTrainer.com that ran a couple of hours past its close, on five-minute extensions, and ended at $20,888. Silver was bidding and stopped, for two reasons. The price was more than Silver's plan for the name could justify. Silver also doubted how many people say fitness trainer. What stops you is the figure, not the clock.

A first bid draws rivals, and the count means nothing

A bid is a signal to other buyers. Many buyers avoid bidding in GoDaddy's regular auctions, Allemann wrote on Domain Name Wire on 2 February 2021, because a bid draws the attention of other bidders.

A name nobody bid on can go on sale a second time. At GoDaddy, an expired name with no bid moves to closeoutCloseoutThe sale a registrar holds after its auction for expired names nobody bid on, at a fixed price that falls each day.Read the definition, which is a fixed-price sale whose price falls by the day, as Allemann reported on Domain Name Wire on 15 January 2021. From 1 February 2021 the closeout price was $50, then $40, $30, $11 and $5, plus the renewal.

Namecheap chose differently. Its auctions with no bid are now extended by 24 hours, with a $5 minimum bid, Allemann reported on Domain Name Wire on 26 March 2025. Its .ai auctions skip the closeout. So on some venues a patient buyer waits for the closeout. On other venues, waiting starts a new auction.

The bid count counts steps, not buyers. In the reactive.com auction of 2022, every $50 step above $135,000 added one bid to a count that was already past 350. Two proxy bids climb one step at a time, and both of them add to the count. The count also includes any bid that a seller or an insider added.

A venue's price history is not clean

A closed price is not always a price someone paid, and not every bid came from a buyer. Joseph Peterson reviewed the record on Domain Name Wire on 25 July 2017. SnapNames admitted in 2009 that an employee had bid against customers for four years. By the company's own analysis, one auction in twenty was affected, and SnapNames paid compensation with interest.

Peterson adds that NameJet had just confirmed that sellers were bidding in their own auctions, against its terms. Shill biddingShill biddingA bid placed to push an auction’s price up rather than to buy, by the seller or someone acting for them. Venues forbid it.Read the definition means placing a bid to push the price up, not to buy the name. In Peterson's words it is a daily occurrence, though most sellers do not do it.

Winners who do not pay mark the record in the same way. As Kevin Murphy wrote on Domain Incite on 26 January 2024, insure.ai and dog.ai, which had been reported sold at $24,700 and $21,311 in the .ai registryRegistryThe organisation that runs an ending, like the company behind .com. It sets the rules and the price registrars pay.Read the definition's previous auction, were back in the next one. The registry was still the holder of both. So the winners, presumably, had not paid.

Murphy's report of 21 March 2024, also on Domain Incite, adds that the registry had raised the deposit for new bidders from 2% to 5%, or $100 if that is more. Too many winners were not paying.

That is why Product's Auctions page, which is on the Investor plan, shows an ended auction's last seen bid, and writes confirmed only when the venue reported the sale. Similar sales reads the sales we track, and never a bid board.

When the ceiling does not apply

Two kinds of reader may bid past the resale ceiling. The first is a company bidding on the name it will use. Allemann reported on Domain Name Wire on 29 December 2025 how 404 Media, which launched on a .co, won the expired 404media.com at GoDaddy for $1,207. 404 Media called it a steal.

In Allemann's reading, an end userEnd userA company or person who buys a name to use it, as opposed to an investor who buys it to resell.Read the definition, meaning a company that will use the name, usually gets a bargain at an expired auction. Most of the other bidders buy to resell, and they need room for a profit. For a company like that, the ceiling is what the name is worth to its business.

The second is the buyer of a top-tier name. Investors who want the finest .com names must pay close to end-user prices, Elliot Silver wrote on DomainInvesting on 24 November 2020. Silver called this unwise for inexperienced investors: a fine line separates overpaying for a top name from overpaying for an average one.

The rule has a cost. Writing on DomainInvesting on 13 October 2020, Silver recalled being an underbidder, one of the bidders who lost, when Ingles.com sold at NameJet for $49,899 in September 2014. The name resold in June 2020 for $400,000. With a ceiling, you lose names that later sell high. You also lose every name that would not have sold high.

Before you bid

• Read Est. value and the Similar sales count and median before you open the venue's page.
• Write down your maximum, together with the resale multiple and the renewals behind it.
• Give the venue that figure as a proxy bid, and do it once, because a proxy bid is binding.
• Close the tab before the final minutes, because an extension is no reason to raise your maximum.
• Ignore the bid count, because it counts steps and proxy bids, not buyers.
• Treat a closed price as a bid until the name changes hands.
• When a name has no bid, check whether the venue runs a closeout before you place the first bid.
• If your own company will use the name, set the ceiling from what the name is worth to you.