Why we don’t sell domains

What’s the incentive problem?

Many domain search tools are registrars, or are paid by one. Every name shown as “available” is a potential sale. That doesn’t make them dishonest. It makes it expensive for them to be strict. Marking a name unverified and hiding it is a lost sale. Showing it as available and letting checkout sort it out is not.

Over time that shapes the product. More extensions shown regardless of how carefully they were checked. Premium listings blended in with standard ones. Aftermarket names surfaced next to free ones. Each decision is defensible on its own; the sum is a search that overstates what’s free.

What changes when you don’t sell?

• There’s no reason to show a name we couldn’t confirm, so we don’t.
• There’s no reason to prefer one extension over another, so extensions are chosen to fit the brief.
• There’s no markup to hide, so the price shown is the registrar’s price.
• There’s no reason to bury the price until checkout, so it’s next to the name.

None of these are acts of virtue. They are what’s left when the conflict is removed. That is the argument for the structure rather than for our character: you should not have to trust us about any of it.

What does it cost us?

Revenue we’d otherwise have. Registrars earn on registrations and renewals, on every name, every year. Webault earns nothing at the moment you buy, which is a smaller and slower business. It is also one where the product only has to do one thing well.

It costs you one extra step: the Buy link takes you to a registrar, and you complete the registration there. We think that’s the right place for it to happen, and it means you can use the registrar you already have rather than the one we’d have picked.

Will this ever change?

If it does, we’ll say so here, in the FAQ and on the homepage, on the same day. The lines “Webault takes no cut” and “nothing to mark up” are true as of the review date below, and they are the kind of line that should come with a date attached rather than sitting there indefinitely.

That’s the only commitment worth making about a future business model: not that it will never change, but that the pages saying otherwise will change with it. How it works carries the same date discipline.

Plainly

Webault doesn’t sell domains, so it has no incentive to overstate what’s free. The price is the registrar’s, the check is the registry’s, and the name is yours to buy wherever you like.

What Webault does about this

Webault is not a registrar and has no registrar account. It shows the registrar’s price beside each name and links out so you complete the registration yourself.

Questions

Related reading

• Why we hide “unverified” instead of guessing — the four causes of an unclear answer, and why hiding beats guessing.
• What is a premium domain, and why does it cost 100x? — who sets premium prices, and whether they renew that way.
• Registry vs registrar: who actually controls your domain — who holds the record, who sells you access, and who sets the price.