// free tool · no signup
domain search with social handle check.
Search a name and get three things at once: whether the domain is free, whether the matching social handles are, and what it will actually cost you over five years rather than in year one.
why the five-year number is the honest one
Registrar search results are optimised to close a sale today, so they show the first-year price. That number is frequently below what the registrar pays the registry — it is customer acquisition, recovered over the years you stay. Two domains advertised at similar introductory prices can differ by a lot once you have held them a while.
So we rank by total cost of ownership instead. You can see the same data laid out per TLD on the renewal price pages, and the reasoning behind it in total cost of ownership.
on TLD trust
A handful of TLDs — the ones that were free or near-free for years — carry so much abuse history that mail servers filter them by default. Choosing one for a side project is fine. Choosing one for a business that sends email means fighting a deliverability problem you created on day one, for the sake of a few pounds a year.
We flag those explicitly rather than quietly ranking them lower, and we never suggest one as an alternative. If you have already got one, the warning is not a reason to panic — it is a reason to send your transactional mail from something else.
handles matter more than they used to
Getting the domain and discovering the handle is gone on the two platforms you actually need is a bad week. Checking both at once takes the same amount of time and removes the problem, which is the entire argument for doing it here rather than in a registrar search box.
questions people actually ask.
Does this check social media handles as well as the domain?
Yes. Alongside domain availability we check whether the matching handle is free on GitHub, X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, so you find out before you commit to a name rather than after you have built a brand around it.
What does the five-year cost column mean?
First-year price plus four years of renewals at each registrar. It exists because registrars compete on the first-year figure while renewals do the real damage — the cheapest domain to register is often among the most expensive to keep, and only the five-year number shows that.
What is TLD trust, and does it affect search rankings?
It is about reputation and email deliverability, not search. Some TLDs carry high abuse rates and get filtered aggressively by spam systems, so mail from them lands in junk folders. Google has said repeatedly that the TLD does not affect ranking — but a domain whose email nobody receives is still a bad choice.
Why are your alternatives different from a registrar's suggestions?
Registrars mostly generate suggestions by bolting prefixes and suffixes onto what you typed — get-, -hq, -app — because those are always available. We rank swaps on brandability and TLD trust and never suggest a TLD we would warn you about, which produces fewer options and better ones.
The name I want is taken. What now?
Add it to a watchlist. Domains lapse constantly, and a watchlist tracks the one you want through the deletion lifecycle and tells you when it reaches each stage. Be realistic about genuinely valuable names — professional drop-catchers move in milliseconds — but most taken domains are not being fought over.
// stop checking one at a time
found one? don't lose track of it.
Owndle tracks the domains you buy — renewal cost, expiry alerts, and whether a cheaper registrar exists — and watches the ones you want but cannot have yet, telling you when they lapse. Free for ten domains.
start free — 10 domains →// no card · magic-link sign-in · alerts at 90/30/7/1 days
All five tools are free and need no account. They run on the same data as the product: registry records over RDAP and our cross-registrar price catalog. How we source it is written up in the methodology.