NameBio Alternative: Domain Appraisal and Sold Domain Prices in One Tool
Type the name. Get an estimate with the comparable sales it was built from, free and without an account.
Every estimate shows its work: the comparable sales and the signal breakdown it was built from, then the names like it you can buy right now.
The appraisal desk is open
Type a domain like sunsetcapital.com or a keyword like capital to see its estimated value, the sales that prove it, and matching names for sale.
Automated estimate for informational purposes only. Not financial or investment advice, and not a guarantee of sale price.
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.
The short answer
People look for a NameBio alternative for one of two reasons, and they need different answers. If you want the raw public record of what domains sold for, nothing free matches NameBio's breadth, though DNJournal and the sales archives at Sedo, Afternic and GoDaddy cover a lot of it between them. If what you actually want is a number for your own name, NameBio was never going to give you that. It is a sales database, not an appraisal.
What changed is the free tier. A free NameBio search now returns 25 results, down from 150 for registered users when paid accounts launched in January 2019, and sales under $100 have been paywalled that whole time. So a free search shows you 25 of the loudest results with the bottom of the range removed, which pushes your price expectation up. Below: what each tier unlocks, every public source of sold prices compared, and where an appraisal is the faster tool.
Free tier limits and paid features read from Domain Name Wire coverage dated 7 January 2019 and 16 July 2026. NameBio blocks automated access to its own memberships page, so current prices are reported rather than re-read
The number most comparisons skip
What a free NameBio account can and cannot see
This is the table that decides whether you need an alternative at all. Two limits matter far more than the rest: how many results one search returns, and whether sales under $100 are visible.
| Capability | Free account | Paid account | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Results per search | 25 | More, rising by tier | Enough for one exact name. Not enough to build a comp set across a keyword |
| Sales under $100 | Hidden | Visible | These are mostly expired auction results. Removing them lifts the range you see |
| Bulk search of a domain list | No | Yes | The only practical way to check a portfolio against past sales |
| Export to a spreadsheet | No | Yes | Required for any analysis you want to keep or share |
| Alerts on saved searches | No | Yes | Tells you when a name matching your criteria sells |
| Top aftermarket keywords | Top 10 | Top 100 | The difference between a headline and a research list |
| Keyword sales spreadsheet on the API page | Yes, free | Yes | Retail sales statistics per keyword, broken down by keyword placement. The most useful free thing here |
| A valuation for your own name | No | No | NameBio does not appraise. No tier changes that |
On pricing, the honest position is a range with a date on it. NameBio launched paid accounts in January 2019 at $10, $25 and $100 a month, and the $25 tier was the one that unlocked export and sub-$100 sales. Its memberships page returns a block to automated requests, so we cannot confirm today's figures and we are not going to invent them. Check the page before you subscribe.
The bias nobody mentions
A free comp search is censored at the bottom, not the top
Put the two free limits together and you get a specific distortion. Twenty five results, sorted to show you the notable ones, with every sale under $100 removed. The sales that disappear are overwhelmingly expired auction results, which is exactly where most of the volume in this market sits. What survives is the interesting end.
That matters when you are the seller, because it is how people talk themselves into a five figure asking price on a name whose real comparables are three figures. It matters more when you are the buyer, because the seller quoting you a number has often done exactly that search. Knowing the floor is missing from their evidence is worth more in a negotiation than any script.
The fix is not complicated. Either pay for the tier that shows the whole range, or use a valuation that was built against the whole range and shows you the comparable sales it used. What you should not do is treat 25 filtered rows as the market. Our guide to domain sales history goes through what the public record covers and what it structurally misses.
Every place sold prices are published
Domain sales databases and appraisal tools compared
Two different products get lumped together in this comparison. A sales database tells you what other names sold for. An appraisal tool tells you what your name is worth. Both columns are here because the search that brought you to this page usually mixes them up.
| Source | What it is | Coverage | Cost | How solid is our reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NameBio | Sales database | Broadest public record of reported aftermarket sales, over a million records worth more than $3 billion | Capped free search. Paid tiers launched at $10, $25 and $100 a month | Feature limits from Domain Name Wire, Jan 2019 and Jul 2026. Prices not re-verifiable, page blocks us |
| DNJournal | Curated sales reports | Weekly and annual reports of the larger reported deals, two decades deep | Free | Read from dnjournal.com directly |
| Sedo, Afternic, GoDaddy sales pages | Venue archives | Only that venue's own completed sales, one venue at a time | Free | Vendor published. Coverage is partial by design |
| DNPric.es | Sales database | Reported at more than 600,000 domain sales | Not published in a form we could read | Reported only. The site refuses automated requests from us |
| DN Sale Price | Sales database | Presents itself as a source of sales history and comparable sales | Unknown | Reported only. Also blocks us, so we make no claim about depth |
| Estibot | Appraisal tool | Algorithmic valuation. Not a sales database | Not published anywhere we can verify | Unreachable for many months and secondary sources contradict each other, so we publish no figure |
| HumbleWorth | Appraisal tool | Bulk valuation up to 2,000 names. Shows no comparable sales | Free | Read from its own site. Methodology is thin and undocumented |
| GoDaddy appraisal | Appraisal tool | Machine valuation trained on GoDaddy's own transaction data | Free | Vendor published. Accuracy varies widely by name type |
| Atom | Marketplace | Its own brandable inventory. Asking prices more than sold prices | Free to browse. Seller commission 7.5% to 30% | Commission read from atom.com this month |
| Domainsdealer | Appraisal plus marketplace | Instant estimate for one name, with the comparable sales and signal breakdown shown next to it | Free, no account. Commission only when a name sells | Our own tool. The estimate is automated and not a guarantee of sale price |
We have deliberately left two cells empty rather than fill them. Estibot's pricing and DNPric.es' subscription terms are quoted differently by different current sources and neither site answers automated requests, so a figure from us would be a guess wearing a decimal point. If you need those numbers, read them off the vendor. A longer walk through the valuation tools is on our best domain appraisal tools page.
Pick by the job, not the brand
Three different questions, three different tools
Research
What do names like this sell for?
This is NameBio's job and it does it better than anything else. If you are studying a keyword, an extension or a length class across hundreds of sales, pay for the tier that removes the caps. There is no free substitute at that depth and pretending otherwise wastes your time.
Pricing
What is this one name worth?
A database will not answer this, because your exact name almost certainly never sold. You need a valuation that generalizes from comparable sales, and you need to see which comparables it used so you can argue with it. That is what the tool at the top of this page does.
Transacting
How do I actually buy or sell it?
Neither a database nor an appraisal moves a domain. You need a venue, an escrow route and a transfer. A number with no route to a deal is where most domain research quietly stops being useful.
Keep paying NameBio if
You trade weekly and need to check lists of names against past sales before you bid.
You want to study a keyword or extension across hundreds of sales rather than price one name.
You need to export data and keep it, which no free source lets you do at scale.
You want alerts when comparable names sell, which is genuinely useful and rare.
You list featured domains often enough that the member discount covers the subscription on its own.
Use an appraisal instead if
You own one name and want to know what to ask for it this week.
You have been quoted a price and need to know whether it is defensible before you counter.
Your exact name returns nothing in the database, which is the normal result for anything brandable.
You want the estimate and the evidence in one place rather than reading rows and doing the arithmetic yourself.
You need to get from a number to an actual listing or an actual offer, not just to a spreadsheet.
Those two lists are not in competition as often as the search term suggests. Plenty of investors keep a NameBio subscription for research and use an appraisal for day to day pricing. The mistake is paying for a research tool to answer a pricing question, or trying to answer a research question from 25 free rows.
A limit no subscription fixes
Every sales database is a sample, not the market
NameBio compiles publicly reported sales and says so plainly: the data is believed correct but not guaranteed. The gap is not in the records it holds, it is in the ones that never existed. Private deals, broker negotiated sales and anything under a non disclosure agreement are simply absent, and those skew toward the larger transactions.
You can see the shape of the problem in the arithmetic. Roughly 144,700 publicly reported sales worth about $185 million across 2024 divides out to a mean near $1,280 per sale. That figure is doing a lot of work it cannot support: a few seven figure deals pull the mean well above the median, and the reported set is a fraction of everything that actually traded. It is useful as an order of magnitude and misleading as a benchmark.
Practically, this is why an exact match search usually comes back empty and why the skill is choosing comparables rather than looking up an answer. If you want the mechanics of that, we walk through it in how to check what a domain sold for, and the biggest public deals are collected on our most expensive domain names page.
Our interest, stated plainly
We sell domains, so we benefit when you price one and list it
Domainsdealer is a domain marketplace with an appraisal tool attached. We charge no upfront listing fee and take commission only when a name sells, 12 percent on the Investor plan and 8 percent on Pro Broker, down to 5 percent negotiated on large portfolios. Full rates are on our pricing page. That is the incentive behind this page and you should read it knowing that.
Which is also why the comparison above says out loud that NameBio is better than us at the thing NameBio does. We are not a sales database and we are not going to claim to be one. Our estimate is automated, it is not investment advice, and it is not a guarantee of what a name will fetch. What it does that a database cannot is turn comparable sales into a number for your specific name, in one search, and then give you somewhere to take it.
Questions people ask
NameBio alternatives, answered
What is the best NameBio alternative?
It depends which job you are doing. For the raw public record of reported sales, DNJournal and the marketplace sales archives at Sedo, Afternic and GoDaddy are the closest free substitutes, though each is narrower than NameBio. For turning comparable sales into a number you can quote, an appraisal tool that shows the comps behind its estimate is the faster route, and it is what most people actually wanted from NameBio.
How many results does a free NameBio search show?
Twenty five, as reported by Domain Name Wire in July 2026. That allowance has been cut hard over time. When NameBio launched paid accounts in January 2019 it gave guests 100 results per search and registered users 150. A 25 result cap is workable for checking one exact name and too small for building a comp set across a keyword.
Does NameBio show sales under $100?
Not on a free account. Seeing sales below $100 has required a paid tier since paid accounts launched in January 2019. Those low sales are mostly expired domain auction results, so a free search is filtered at the bottom of the range. If you price a name from free comps alone, your expectation will sit higher than the full market data would support.
How much does NameBio cost?
NameBio launched paid accounts in January 2019 at $10, $25 and $100 a month, with the $25 tier being the one required to export results and to see 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 current prices today and you should confirm them there before subscribing.
Does NameBio have a domain appraisal tool?
No, and that is the most common misunderstanding about it. NameBio is a searchable record of what other domains sold for. It does not produce a valuation for your name. You read the comps and do the judgment yourself. An appraisal tool does the opposite: it returns an estimate for your specific name and shows the comparable sales it leaned on.
Is NameBio accurate?
Its individual records are reliable enough to work from, and NameBio states the data is believed correct but not guaranteed. The accuracy problem is coverage, not the numbers. Only publicly reported sales are in there, and most private and broker-negotiated deals are never disclosed, so the database is a sample of the market rather than the market.
Can you export NameBio search results?
Only on a paid account. Export to a spreadsheet, bulk search of a domain list, and alerts on saved searches all sit behind the subscription, and export specifically required the middle tier when paid accounts launched. Free users read results on screen one search at a time, which is the practical limit for anyone appraising a portfolio.
Is there a free alternative to NameBio?
Partly. DNJournal publishes its weekly and annual sales reports free and has done for two decades, but it covers only the larger reported deals. Sedo, Afternic and GoDaddy each publish their own completed sales free, so together they cover a lot of ground, just venue by venue. No free source matches NameBio for breadth of small and mid range sales.
Does NameBio have an API?
Yes, NameBio publishes an API page, and that page also carries a free spreadsheet of retail sales statistics for every keyword broken down by keyword placement. That spreadsheet is the most useful free thing NameBio gives away and almost nobody uses it. It will not price one specific name, but it will tell you whether a keyword sells at all.
Should I pay for NameBio?
Pay for it if you buy or sell domains weekly, run lists through bulk search, or need to export data for analysis. At that volume the subscription is trivial against a single deal. Skip it if you are pricing one name you own or one name you want to buy, because a single appraisal with visible comps answers that question in seconds.
What did the average domain sell for?
Dividing the reported totals gives about $1,280. NameBio recorded roughly 144,700 publicly reported sales worth around $185 million across 2024. Read that mean carefully: a handful of seven figure sales drag it upward so the median is far lower, and only a small share of retail sales is ever reported in the first place.
How do I find out what a domain sold for?
Search the exact name in the public sales databases first, then widen to comparable names when the exact name returns nothing, which is the usual outcome. If the name changed hands privately there will be no record at all. At that point comparable sales and an appraisal are the only evidence available, and a seller quoting you a price knows that too.
Keep reading
Domain sales history
Where sold prices are published and what the public record structurally misses.
Best domain appraisal tools
Every valuation tool worth using, and how far each one can be trusted.
Bulk domain appraisal
Price a whole portfolio at once instead of one search at a time.
Sell premium domains
What to do with the number once you have one you can defend.
Get the number and the comps in one search.
Appraise the name against comparable sales, free and without an account. Then decide whether you need a subscription at all.