// domain expiration monitoring
never lose a domain to a date you forgot.
Alerts at 90, 30, 7 and 1 days before every domain you own expires — across every registrar, whether or not you can still log into it. Expiry dates come straight from the registry, not from your inbox.
the failure mode nobody plans for
Almost nobody loses a domain because they decided not to renew it. They lose it because a card expired, or the renewal notice went to an address they no longer read, or the domain was in an account belonging to a contractor who left. Auto-renew is not a safety net — it is one more thing that can fail quietly, and it reports success right up until the moment it doesn’t.
Monitoring is independent verification. Owndle reads the expiry date from the registry itself, so an alert fires whether or not your registrar sent you anything, and whether or not you still have working credentials for that account.
why 90 days matters more than 7
Most reminder tools start shouting a week out. By then your only real option is to pay whatever your current registrar charges. Ninety days is enough time to check what the renewal actually costs elsewhere, unlock the domain, get the auth code and complete a transfer — which both saves the price difference and buys you a year.
That is why our alerts carry the price comparison inline. Knowing a domain expires in 90 days is a reminder. Knowing it expires in 90 days and renews for less elsewhere is a decision you can act on. Have a look at the gap between registrars if you want to see the size of it.
how the alerts reach you
- Email — with the renewal price, the cheapest tracked alternative and the annual difference in the message itself.
- Push — through the iOS app or web push, for the 7-day and 1-day alerts you cannot afford to leave in an inbox.
- The dashboard — an expiring view showing everything due in the next 90 days, sorted by date.
the lifecycle, and when it stops being recoverable
A domain does not vanish the moment it expires. It moves through a grace period where you can usually renew normally, a redemption period where recovery carries a steep registry fee, and pending delete, where it is gone and you are competing with drop-catchers to re-register it. The whole path is set out in the deletion lifecycle entry — worth reading once before you need it.
If you are reading this because something has already lapsed, start here instead: my domain expired — can I get it back?
questions people actually ask.
Doesn't auto-renew already handle this?
It does until it doesn't, and it fails silently. An expired card, a changed billing address, a renewal receipt in spam, or auto-renew quietly switching off after a transfer will all lose you a domain while the setting still reads 'on'. Monitoring is the check that the automation actually fired.
How far in advance do the alerts start?
Ninety days, then 30, 7 and 1. The 90-day alert is the important one: it is the only window wide enough to transfer a domain to a cheaper registrar before you pay the dear renewal, since ICANN blocks transfers in some circumstances and transfers themselves take up to a week.
Where does the expiry data come from?
Directly from each TLD's authoritative registry over RDAP, the protocol that replaced WHOIS. That means the date is the registry's own record rather than something scraped from your registrar's dashboard, and it works for domains at registrars you have no API access to.
What happens if a domain has already expired?
It enters a grace period where you can usually still renew at the normal price, then a redemption period where recovery costs substantially more, then pending delete where you cannot recover it at all. Owndle shows which stage a domain is in. We wrote the full recovery path up in our expired-domain guide.
Can I monitor domains I don't own?
Yes — the watchlist tracks domains registered to someone else and alerts you as they move through the deletion lifecycle toward becoming available. It is honest about what that gets you: professional drop-catchers win the genuinely valuable names within milliseconds, but for most domains the visibility is enough to act on.
// stop checking one at a time
check a domain now, monitor it in a minute.
The free expiry checker tells you when any domain expires, no signup required. If you want to be told before it happens — for that domain and everything else you own — that is what the free tier does.
start free — 10 domains →// no card · magic-link sign-in · alerts at 90/30/7/1 days