I Had 40 Name Ideas and One Very Slow Afternoon

A friend and I were naming a small project, the kind of thing that starts as a Saturday afternoon idea and somehow turns into an actual community. We had a notebook page full of candidates, close to forty names by the time we stopped, each one crossed out, rewritten, argued over.

Then came the part nobody warns you about. Checking if any of them were actually available.

I opened a registrar site and typed in name one. Available. Great, except it came bundled with a page full of "domains you might also like" ads, three upsells for hosting I didn't want, and a countdown timer pretending there was urgency where there wasn't any. Name two, taken. Name three, taken, but here's a very similar one for $4,000, interested? By name eight I was tabbing back and forth so much I'd lost track of which names I'd already checked.

Forty names, one at a time, through a UI built to sell me things I didn't ask for. I was maybe a third of the way through when I seriously considered just picking whatever was left standing instead of what we actually wanted.

The part that should have been obvious sooner

The registrar wasn't doing anything special. Under the hood it was just asking "is this domain registered, yes or no" over and over. There's no reason that has to happen one slow page load at a time, it's a lookup, and lookups can be batched.

I found APIFreaks' Bulk Domain Checker, which does exactly that: send it a list of domain names in one request, up to a hundred at a time, and it hands back an availability status for every single one. No ads, no countdown, no "similar domain" upsell in the middle of the results. I pasted our whole list, added a couple of TLD variations for the names we liked most, about 120 checks total, and had every answer back before I'd have finished checking name ten by hand.

Three names came back available that we actually liked. We picked one before the afternoon was over.

What availability doesn't tell you

Worth being honest about this part. A domain being unregistered doesn't mean the name is actually free to use. It says nothing about whether the name is already trademarked, whether the matching handle is taken on every social platform that matters to you, or whether some other project quietly owns the .io and is just letting the .xyz sit unregistered on purpose. We still checked trademarks and socials separately before locking anything in. The availability check answers exactly one question, "is this specific domain currently registered," and it answers that one question fast. Treat it as the first filter, not the last one.

What I'd reach for again

APIFreaks is a single API key covering more than a hundred endpoints, domain tools being one small corner of it, so this wasn't a special-purpose tool I had to go find, it was already sitting there. The free tier gives 10,000 credits with no card required, more than enough for a naming session or twenty.

(Disclosure since I'm naming a product I work with: I'm connected to APIFreaks. That said, the actual lesson here has nothing to do with which provider you use, it's that any check you're about to do forty times by hand in a browser is worth five minutes spent doing it once in bulk instead.)

Next time you're staring down a list of name ideas, don't burn your afternoon one tab at a time. Batch it, get every answer at once, and spend the time you saved actually deciding which name you like instead of which ones happened to still be available by the time you got to them.