dan.com has shut down: where to manage and sell domains now.

type dan.com into a browser today and you land somewhere else. GoDaddy acquired Dan.com, migrated its marketplace into Afternic and shut the original site down in 2025.

the sales side of that migration was handled. listings moved, buyers were redirected, transactions carried on. what did not survive is the part people were quietly relying on: Dan was where their portfolio lived. not because it was a portfolio tracker — it never claimed to be — but because it was the one screen showing every domain they cared about with a price beside it, and screens like that become systems of record whether designed to or not.

Afternic is a sales marketplace. a good one, and not that screen.

what actually happened

GoDaddy bought Dan.com, ran the two marketplaces in parallel for a while, then consolidated. Dan's listings and transaction machinery went into Afternic; the dan.com domain now redirects. if you had active listings you have almost certainly already been through the migration prompts.

consolidation is not a scandal. but a migration moves the features the acquirer has a place for, and the ones with nowhere to land get dropped without anybody sending an email.

the job that got orphaned

Dan's dashboard listed what you had, what you were asking, what had sold and what was pending. people used it as an inventory. that is a use case rather than a feature, which is why it is easy to lose in a migration — nobody in a product review says "a chunk of these users treat this as their spreadsheet", because nobody measured that.

so the practical loss is not that a marketplace closed. it is that people woke up without a single view of their holdings, and the replacement answers a different question. Afternic tells you what you are selling. it does not tell you what you own, what it costs to keep owning it, or what is about to lapse.

worth stating before the list of tools, because it will happen again: a marketplace is not a system of record. it only knew about the domains you listed, and had no view of the ones sitting unlisted at three registrars costing you money every year. the domains that lapse are never the listed ones.

for selling: afternic and sedo

if the job is moving a name to a buyer, this is the straightforward part.

Afternic is where Dan went, so it is the default by inertia and by distribution — plumbed into GoDaddy's registrar-level search and a wide reseller network, which is the actual product. listings surface where someone tries to register the name and finds it taken.

Sedo is the long-standing independent alternative, with its own marketplace, brokerage and auctions, and no relationship to your registrar. plenty of sellers list on both — though check the specifics of any exclusive or fast-transfer arrangement, since that is where the constraints hide.

we are not going to quote commission rates at you. they change, they vary by listing type and price band, and a number in a blog post is quietly wrong six months later. read the current terms before you list.

for landing pages: efty

the other thing Dan did well was the for-sale page — a clean landing page on the domain itself, with a price and a buy button, converting the traffic a good name generates on its own.

Efty is the established independent option for that job: for-sale landing pages across a portfolio, plus sales management on top. if what you miss is the presentation layer rather than the marketplace, that is the direction to look. it is also a different commercial model — paying for tooling rather than a cut of a sale — which suits people holding a lot of names.

for portfolio tracking and renewal cost: owndle

this is the orphaned job, and a genuinely different product category from the two above.

the questions a marketplace never answered: what do I own across every registrar, including the ones I forgot. what does the lot cost me a year. which renewals am I overpaying for. what expires in the next 90 days, and does it have auto-renew on.

owndle is built for that gap. it reads registration data from the authoritative registry over RDAP rather than from registrar APIs, so a domain you have not touched in three years shows up with a correct expiry date without you finding the login. it prices every renewal against a cross-registrar catalogue and returns one annual figure plus a flag on everything overpriced — renewal arbitrage. it alerts at 90, 30, 7 and 1 days before expiry. and it holds an estimated value per domain, which is the bit that touches the marketplace question: sorting by whether a name is worth another renewal is how you decide what to list.

it does not sell domains and will not become a marketplace. most portfolio holders end up with a tracker for the inventory and a marketplace for the exit, because those are separate jobs. the free tier covers ten domains; without an account, put a TLD through price check.

a migration checklist

if Dan was doing more for you than you had noticed, this is the recovery order:

• rebuild the inventory from registrars rather than memory. export the list from every account you have, including the two you had forgotten. a set of marketplace listings is not an inventory, it is a subset that flatters you.
• check what is actually still yours. run the list through bulk WHOIS and read the expiry dates and status codes. names that lapsed while your attention was on the migration are the common casualty, and the grace period is short.
• get the annual cost as one number, across every registrar rather than per account. this is the figure the marketplace era hid, and it is usually higher than expected. the price tables show what the same TLDs cost elsewhere.
• re-point the landing pages. any domain whose DNS aimed at a Dan-hosted for-sale page needs a new destination.
• decide what you are actually selling. with valuation and renewal cost side by side, keep/sell/drop stops being a feeling. names costing more per year than they are plausibly worth are not a portfolio, they are a direct debit.
• alert on the whole lot, not the listed ones. the domains that lapse are the ones nobody looked at, which is what expiry monitoring is for.

the short version

selling moved to Afternic, with Sedo as the independent alternative. landing pages have Efty. the inventory-and-cost job people were doing in Dan's dashboard by accident was never a marketplace feature, and needs a portfolio tracker now.

the durable lesson is the earlier one: keep the record of what you own somewhere with no commercial interest in what you do with it, because platforms consolidate. managing domains across multiple registrars is the general version of the problem.