owndle vs domainmod: portfolio tracking without running a server.

if you already run a server and want a domain portfolio tool that costs nothing and keeps every byte on hardware you control, DomainMOD is the right answer and this page is not going to talk you out of it.

that is not throat-clearing. it is GPL open source, has no domain limit, imports from registrar APIs so the inventory is not hand-typed, and tracks more infrastructure than we do. for a technical user with a VPS and a spare afternoon it is a genuinely good deal — one most comparison pages skip, largely because it pays nobody a commission. what follows is where the two diverge.

what domainmod is

a self-hosted PHP and MySQL application under the GPL: install it on your own server, point it at a database, run it. a long-running project with a slow, steady release cadence rather than a startup shipping every fortnight.

the scope is wider than the name suggests — domains, but also SSL certificates, hosting accounts, DNS providers, IP addresses and registrar accounts, with expiry dates across all of them. multi-currency throughout, which matters when three registrars bill you in three currencies and you want one total. and where a registrar exposes an API it imports directly, so the inventory maintains itself rather than rotting the way a spreadsheet does.

the interface is dated. that is the criticism everyone leads with and it is fair, but also the least interesting thing about the software — a dense admin UI built by people who use it daily rather than demo it. if you have used phpMyAdmin without complaint, you will be fine.

what domainmod is genuinely good at

• it costs nothing, forever, at any scale. no domain limit, no per-seat price. a two-thousand-domain portfolio costs what a twelve-domain one does, which no hosted product here can say.
• you own the data. your database, your server. no vendor, no export process, no question about what happens if a company folds or changes its pricing.
• the asset scope is wider than domains. SSL certificates and hosting accounts expire too, and tracking them beside domains beats anything domain-only, including us.
• registrar API imports. where your registrars expose APIs, it pulls your lists straight from them.
• it cannot be discontinued out from under you. GPL software with a public repository is not subject to somebody else's roadmap decision.

if that list describes your situation, install it. we mean that.

where owndle is different

nothing to run. owndle is hosted. no PHP version to keep current, no database to back up, no TLS certificate to renew, no advisory to action on a wednesday evening. that is the whole trade: you give up hosting your own data and get back the attention hosting it costs.

no registrar API credentials. the difference people most underestimate. owndle reads registration data straight from the authoritative registry over RDAP — expiry, status codes, nameservers, DNSSEC, detected registrar. import is a paste, a CSV or a Cloudflare sync, with no step where you generate API keys at six registrars and find somewhere to keep them. the data is registry truth rather than a registrar's account of its own records.

it tells you when you are overpaying. DomainMOD records what you pay. it holds no opinion about that number and no way to know the same TLD renews for a fraction of it elsewhere. owndle prices every renewal against a cross-registrar catalogue and returns one annual figure, a flag on everything overpriced, and a per-year saving for moving it. that gap is renewal arbitrage, usually the largest number nobody is looking at. see the price tables, or run one TLD through price check without an account.

resale valuation. an estimated value per domain, so a portfolio can be sorted by whether each name is worth keeping. a heuristic, not an appraisal — a sorting key, never a price.

alerts that do not depend on your uptime. DomainMOD will email you if your cron is running and your outbound mail is being delivered. the caveat is structural: self-hosted alerting fails silently when the box does, and what it was going to warn you about is then exactly what you miss. owndle sends staged alerts at 90, 30, 7 and 1 days by email and push, from infrastructure running whether or not anything of yours is.

a phone and an agent. there is a mobile app, plus a CLI and an MCP server if you would rather ask an agent what expires this month than open a tab.

the honest cost of self-hosting

worth being specific about, because 'free' does a lot of work in most write-ups. you are operating a PHP application backed by a database holding your registrar account details: a server, TLS, backups you have tested rather than merely configured, PHP upgrades when your distribution moves on, advisories to watch. none of it is hard. all of it is ongoing, and ongoing is exactly the work that quietly stops happening around month eight.

if this is one more container on a box that already exists, the marginal cost is near zero and you should stop reading. if it would be the only thing you self-host, price the first afternoon honestly, then the ones after it.

choose domainmod if

• you already run a server and adding one more app is a non-event
• zero recurring cost matters more to you than the time it takes
• your data must stay on infrastructure you control, as policy rather than preference
• you want SSL certificates, hosting accounts and DNS providers tracked alongside domains
• your portfolio is large enough that per-domain hosted pricing gets irritating
• a dated interface is not something you have feelings about

choose owndle if

• you would rather not operate a server to find out when a domain expires
• your domains span registrars and you want one annual cost figure
• you want to know whether you are overpaying, not merely what you pay
• you want alerts on your phone rather than mail from a cron job you configured
• you would rather ask an agent than open a dashboard
• ten domains covers your important ones, in which case the free tier costs nothing either

the short version

they answer different questions. DomainMOD answers 'what do I own and when does it expire', comprehensively and free, on hardware you run. owndle answers 'what do I own, when does it expire, and am I being overcharged for it', hosted, with the price comparison as the thing that has to justify a subscription at all.

if overpayment is not a question you care about, DomainMOD wins on cost and it is not close. our free tier covers 10 domains and paid plans start at £9 a month — real money for something you could run yourself, and better you hear that from us. for the wider field, the full comparison covers registrar dashboards, spreadsheets and the rest; there is a companion piece on licensed desktop software.