Best Domain Brokers for Selling a Seven Figure Domain Name, Compared
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Everything this estimate is built on is on this card. An account is for selling: your names on the seller board, each with its own sales page.
Short answer: For a name likely to clear seven figures, the shortlist is short. MediaOptions publishes 15% with a $1,000 minimum and requires exclusivity. Saw.com is reported at 15% or $250, whichever is higher. Sedo runs 10% to 20% depending on how the buyer arrives, and Afternic sits at 15% or 25% depending on your nameservers. The boutique desks that closed the largest sales on record, including the $70 million AI.com deal, do not publish rates at all and negotiate every mandate. At this level the percentage is negotiable, and choosing on headline rate alone is the most expensive mistake available to you.
The reason is arithmetic. On a $40,000 sale the difference between 15% and 20% is $2,000, which is annoying. On a $2 million sale it is $100,000, which is a house deposit. Every point of commission at seven figures is worth more than most domain investors make in a year, and brokers know it, which is why the published rate card is a starting position rather than a price.
A seven figure sale is a different transaction, not a bigger one
Most advice about selling domains is really advice about listing them. Put the name on a marketplace, enable the widest distribution you can, wait for an offer. That works because a $3,000 name has thousands of plausible buyers and the job is exposure.
A seven figure name usually has fewer than ten plausible buyers on earth, and exposure is close to worthless. There is no audience to reach. There is a specific list of funded companies for whom the name would be a strategic rebrand, and the entire job is getting to the right person inside those companies, in the right quarter, with a credible reason to act. That is outbound work, done privately, and it is what you are actually paying a broker for. The commission is not a listing fee, it is the price of access and of somebody else running a negotiation you are too emotionally invested to run.
This also explains why exclusivity keeps appearing in the contracts. A broker who is about to spend weeks approaching a dozen corporate development teams will not do it while you are simultaneously fielding offers through a marketplace, because a buyer who discovers two channels immediately assumes you are desperate and bids accordingly.
Domain brokers compared for high value names
Rates below are seller side. Where a company does not publish a figure, the row says so rather than guessing, because an invented number is worse than no number when six figures of commission depend on it.
| Broker | Seller commission | Minimum | Exclusivity | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MediaOptions | 15% of the final sale price | $1,000 | Exclusive agreement required on all assets, stated as no exceptions | Category defining .com names where a corporate buyer must be found and approached |
| Saw.com | Reported at 15%, or $250 if higher. Payment plan deals reported at 15% plus a $19.99 consultative fee | Reported $250 | Not published | Sellers who want a named broker without a $1,000 floor |
| Sedo brokerage | 10% fixed price, 15% on offers and auctions, 20% via SedoMLS | Minimum applies | Listing can be non exclusive | European and cross border buyers. Note IONOS announced in November 2025 that it plans to sell Sedo |
| Afternic and GoDaddy | 15% on Afternic, Dan or Uniregistry nameservers, 25% otherwise | $15 | Non exclusive | Distribution rather than negotiation. Strong for six figures and below |
| Boutique desks such as GetYourDomain and DomainAssets.com | Not published. Negotiated per mandate | Not published | Typically exclusive for a fixed term | Eight figure names and buy side representation. Both worked the AI.com deal |
| Flippa | Success fee reported around 5% above $100,000, higher on smaller deals, plus a listing fee by tier | Varies by tier | Non exclusive | Domains sold with a business, traffic or revenue attached |
Two rows deserve a second look. The Afternic line at 25% is the one that quietly costs sellers the most, because it applies unless your nameservers point at an approved set, and plenty of people list without changing them. On a $1.2 million sale that default is a $120,000 difference for a DNS setting. The Sedo line matters for a different reason: IONOS said in November 2025 that it intends to sell Sedo, and a brokerage changing hands mid mandate is a real execution risk on a deal that takes months.
What the commission actually costs at seven figures
Run the numbers before you sign anything, because percentages stop feeling abstract fast.
| Sale price | At 10% | At 15% | At 20% | At 25% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $250,000 | $25,000 | $37,500 | $50,000 | $62,500 |
| $1,000,000 | $100,000 | $150,000 | $200,000 | $250,000 |
| $5,000,000 | $500,000 | $750,000 | $1,000,000 | $1,250,000 |
A flat 15% is a perfectly normal rate at $100,000 and an unusual one at $5 million, because the broker's workload does not scale with the price. Finding the buyer for a $5 million name is not fifty times harder than finding the buyer for a $100,000 name, and often it is easier, since there are fewer of them and they are easier to identify. Sliding scales exist for exactly this reason. Asking for one is normal, and a broker who refuses to discuss any structure other than the rate card on a genuinely large name is telling you something about how many of these they have done.
The other number to settle before signing is the floor. A broker paid a percentage has an incentive to close, and closing at $900,000 pays them well even if the name was worth $1.4 million to a buyer you had not reached yet. A written reserve fixes that, and it costs nothing to insist on. While you are at it, agree who pays the escrow fee, because on a seven figure transfer that is a four figure line item and it should not be a surprise at closing. Our breakdown of domain selling fees covers how those layers stack.
How the largest domain sale on record was actually run
The AI.com transaction is the most useful recent case study available, because enough of it was made public to see the shape of the deal. The price was $70 million, which makes it the largest publicly reported domain sale ever, more than double the $30 million paid for Voice.com in 2019. You can see where it sits against everything else in our table of the most expensive domain names ever sold.
Three details are worth copying at any price level. First, there were two brokers, one on each side: Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain represented the seller and John Mauriello of DomainAssets.com represented the buyer. Large deals get their own representation on both sides, the way property transactions do, and a single broker sitting in the middle of a very large negotiation has a conflict that nobody involved should pretend away.
Second, it was completely private. The deal closed in 2025 and stayed unannounced until 6 February 2026, when Crypto.com co-founder Kris Marszalek confirmed he was the buyer, two days before launching the platform with a Super Bowl advertisement. No listing, no auction, no public price discovery. The buyer's launch plan set the disclosure date, not the seller's.
Third, the seller was an individual who had registered the name in the early 1990s because the letters matched his initials, and held it for roughly three decades. Nobody engineered that outcome. It is a reminder that at the very top the scarce asset is patience combined with a name that a future industry ends up needing, and that neither can be manufactured by working harder.
What to ask a domain broker before you sign
Five questions separate a broker who will earn the commission from one who will list your name and wait.
- Which specific companies will you approach, and have you spoken to any of them before? A real answer is a list. A vague answer about their network means they intend to market the name rather than sell it.
- What is the term, and what happens if it lapses? Watch for tail clauses that entitle the broker to a commission on any buyer they contacted, sometimes for a year or more after the mandate ends. That clause is reasonable in principle and frequently drafted far too broadly.
- Is the rate negotiable above a threshold? On a seven figure name, expect a sliding scale to be at least discussable.
- What is the written reserve? Never leave this to a conversation.
- Who holds the domain and who pays for escrow? The name should stay with you until closing, and the money should move through a licensed escrow agent rather than directly between the parties. Our guide to domain escrow covers the current fee tiers.
Do you need a broker to sell a high value domain?
Not always, and the honest test is whether you already know who the buyer is. If a specific company has an obvious need for the name and you can reach their chief marketing officer or head of corporate development directly, a broker is buying you negotiating distance rather than access, and that is worth less than 15%. Many large private sales are done exactly this way.
If you do not know who the buyer is, or you know but cannot get a reply, or you suspect you will accept the first serious number out of relief, then the commission is buying something real. Sellers routinely leave more than 15% on the table by negotiating against themselves, and the emotional dynamics of selling an asset you have owned for a decade are not a small factor.
How long does it take to sell a seven figure domain?
Plan for months, not weeks, and possibly for years. A corporate rebrand is budgeted annually, so a buyer who loves the name in March may genuinely be unable to act until the next fiscal year. Brokers working the top of the market commonly describe mandates running six to eighteen months, and the largest sales are frequently the result of a relationship that predates the mandate entirely. Anyone promising a quick close on a seven figure name is either exceptionally lucky or planning to price it low enough to be easy.
What is a realistic commission for a seven figure domain sale?
Somewhere between 5% and 15%, tilting toward the lower end as the price rises. The published 15% rates are set for a market where most deals are five figures. On a genuinely large mandate, a sliding structure that steps down above an agreed threshold is common enough that asking for one will not surprise a competent broker. Get whatever you agree in writing, including how the rate applies to the portion of the price above the step.
Before you talk to anyone, know the number
Every conversation in this process goes better if you have an independent view of what the name is worth, and worse if your only reference point is a headline sale. Start with comparable sold names rather than asking prices, which is what domain sales history and the domain worth calculator are for. If the name is attached to a business with revenue rather than sitting idle, the valuation question changes shape and the buyer will want to see the numbers behind it, which is a different exercise from appraising a domain on its own.
One piece of due diligence gets skipped more than any other, and it is cheap. Before you take a large name to market, check whether it has been fought over before, since a prior trademark complaint or a UDRP proceeding against the domain will surface in any serious buyer's legal review and is far better discovered by you than by them. Searching the case record for prior disputes takes an afternoon and occasionally saves a deal. If the name is clean, that fact is worth stating in your first email to a buyer.
From there, selling a premium domain covers what a sale actually nets after fees, and domain broker services explains how buy side and sell side mandates differ.