Domain Checker
Three questions at once, which no free tool answers together: is the name taken, is it quietly for sale, and does it collide with a trademark. Registries are asked over RDAP, DNS corroborates, and marketplace listings come from the marketplaces' own APIs.
| Domain | Status | Detail | Action |
|---|
How to read it
“In use” requires evidence, not the absence of parking. Mail records used to be treated as proof a domain was live, which was wrong three ways over: Namecheap switches free forwarding on for every domain it registers, 0 . is a null MX that declares the domain accepts no mail at all, and a bare v=spf1 -all declares that nothing may send as it. All three appear on parked domains. A domain now counts as in use only on positive signals — mail beyond a registrar default, an SPF that authorises senders, or verification records.
“For sale” is inferred first, confirmed second. Marketplaces park the names they are selling on their own nameservers, which is visible before anyone is asked. That is a strong signal, not proof. Where a marketplace publishes an API we ask it and show the real price; where it does not, the row says so. A source we could not reach is reported as unchecked, never as “not for sale.”
A rate limit is never read as availability. Registries throttle, and when one does the answer is unknown and the check is retried. Telling you a taken domain is free is the worst mistake this tool could make, so backoff is handled as its own condition rather than folded in with “no record found”.
Dates. The RDAP expiry says when a domain would fall free if nobody renews it, and the statuses pendingDelete and redemptionPeriod mean it is on its way back to open registration — at which point you catch the drop rather than approach the owner.
What this costs in privacy
Lookups used to run in your browser, so nothing about them reached us. They now run on our side, because registries rate-limit browsers, most send no CORS header, and marketplace prices cannot be fetched from a page at all. That is a real trade and it should be stated plainly:
- What is stored: the domain name, what we found, and when. Results are kept so a repeat check is instant and so change history means something.
- What is not: who asked. No account, no cookie, no IP logged against a lookup — the stored row is about the domain, not about you.
- Limits now exist. A bulk run is capped and queued, and the queue is paced so we do not earn rate limits from registries that would slow everyone down.
- Everything is public data. RDAP, DNS and marketplace listings are published records; checking a domain here reveals nothing the registry would not tell anyone who asked.