NameBio Pricing: What Each Paid Tier Costs and Who Should Pay For It

NameBio's paid accounts launched in January 2019 at three levels, $10, $25 and $100 a month, and the middle tier was the one that mattered because it unlocked both data export and sales under $100. Those are the figures on the public record. NameBio blocks automated access to its own memberships page, so we cannot re-read today's prices and we are not going to invent a number, but the shape of the offer has been stable: more results per search, the full price range, bulk search, export, alerts, and a discount on featured listings.

Whether it is worth paying depends on one question, and it is not how much you like the interface. It is how many pricing decisions you make a month. At one name a month the subscription is an expensive way to answer a question an appraisal answers in a second. At thirty names a month it is the cheapest research you will buy all year.

What each NameBio tier unlocks

The tiers are cumulative rather than feature-gated in odd ways, which makes the decision cleaner than most SaaS pricing pages.

One caveat on that table, stated plainly because it is the whole reason to read this page rather than a review that sounds more confident. The prices are the launch prices reported by Domain Name Wire on 7 January 2019, and the feature split for export and sub-$100 sales comes from the same source. The 25 result free cap and the top 10 versus top 100 keyword split come from Domain Name Wire's July 2026 coverage. NameBio's memberships page returns a block to automated requests, so confirm the current numbers there before you enter a card.

The free tier got smaller, and that is the real story

When paid accounts launched, guests got 100 results per search and registered free users got 150. As of July 2026 a free search returns 25. That is an 83 percent cut to the registered free allowance, and it changes what free NameBio is for. It is now a lookup tool, not a research tool.

The second free limit matters more and gets mentioned less. Sales below $100 have been paywalled the entire time paid accounts have existed. Those low sales are mostly expired domain auction results, which is where a large share of the market's actual volume sits. So a free search hands you 25 rows with the bottom of the price range removed. If you price a name from that, your expectation sits higher than the full data would support, and it sits higher in a direction that costs you a sale rather than money.

This is a general pattern with public transaction records, not a NameBio quirk. The underlying data is public in principle and genuinely awkward to query in practice, so somebody builds an index and charges for access to it. The same trade shows up in every asset class with an open ledger, including on-chain markets where analysts pay for a fully indexed transaction history you can query directly rather than run their own node and write the tooling. Paying for the index is usually correct. What is not correct is assuming the free window onto that index is a representative sample of it.

Does a NameBio subscription pay for itself?

Run the arithmetic against what a pricing mistake costs, because that is the actual comparison, not the monthly line item.

The middle tier at $25 a month is $300 a year. On a single $2,500 sale at a typical marketplace commission you are paying somewhere between $190 and $625 in fees, so the subscription is roughly the cost of one small sale's commission across the whole year. If better comps move one asking price by 15 percent on one $5,000 name, the subscription paid for itself twice over in a single deal. That is not a hard bar to clear if you are transacting regularly.

The offset most people miss is the featured listing discount. Paid members get money off featured listing orders on NameBio itself, and if you promote names there with any regularity that discount can cover the subscription independently of the data. Worth checking against your actual listing spend rather than assuming it is marketing garnish.

The bar it does not clear is the occasional user. If you own four names and you are trying to work out what to ask for one of them, $300 a year is a strange way to answer a question that an appraisal answers immediately. The honest comparison there is not free NameBio versus paid NameBio. It is a sales database versus a valuation, and those are different products, which we work through on our NameBio alternative page.

The free thing on the API page that almost nobody uses

NameBio publishes a free spreadsheet of retail sales statistics for every keyword, broken down by keyword placement, on its API page. It costs nothing and it answers a question most investors get wrong by feel: does this keyword sell at all, and does it sell better at the front of a name or the back.

It will not price your specific domain. It will stop you buying into a keyword that has never traded, which is a more expensive mistake than misjudging a price by 20 percent. If you are going to use one free NameBio asset properly, use that one rather than burning your 25 result searches.

What no NameBio tier gives you

A valuation. This is the most common misunderstanding about the product and no amount of money fixes it, because it is not what NameBio is. It records what other domains sold for. It does not tell you what yours is worth, and for anything brandable your exact name has almost certainly never sold, so the exact match search comes back empty and you are back to judgment.

That gap is where the work actually lives. Choosing comparables well is the skill, and it is the part a database hands back to you. A valuation that shows the comparable sales behind its number does that step for you and lets you argue with it, which is faster and more auditable than reading rows and doing the arithmetic in your head. If you are pricing a whole book of names rather than one, bulk domain appraisal is the right shape of tool, and where sold prices are published in the first place is covered on our domain sales history page.

How much does NameBio cost?

Paid accounts launched in January 2019 at $10, $25 and $100 a month. The $25 tier is the one that unlocks export and sales under $100, so it is the practical entry point for anyone doing analysis rather than lookups. NameBio blocks automated access to its memberships page, so treat those figures as the public record and confirm current prices on the page.

Is NameBio free?

Free to search, with two limits that shape what you can learn. A free account returns 25 results per search, and sales under $100 are hidden. You also cannot export, bulk search or set alerts. It is enough to check whether one name has ever sold, and not enough to build a comp set across a keyword.

Is NameBio worth it for a small portfolio?

Usually not. Under roughly twenty names, the subscription costs more attention than it returns, and the pricing questions you have are one-name questions that an appraisal answers faster. The point where it flips is not portfolio size exactly, it is transaction frequency: once you are pricing names weekly, pay for it.

Is there a cheaper way to get the same data?

Not for the same breadth. DNJournal publishes weekly and annual sales reports free, and Sedo, Afternic and GoDaddy each publish their own completed sales, so between them you cover a lot of ground venue by venue. None of them matches NameBio for small and mid range sales, which is precisely the range most of us are pricing in.

What should I do instead if I just need a number?

Appraise the name and read the comparables the estimate was built from, then sanity check the two or three that look closest against the public record. That sequence takes a couple of minutes, costs nothing, and gives you both the figure and the evidence you would need to defend it in a negotiation. The subscription is for the month you start doing this thirty times.

Our own commission structure is on the pricing page, and we take nothing until a name sells, which is the disclosure that belongs at the end of any page where we discuss a competitor's fees.