What founders actually pay for a domain.

If your company is named after an ordinary English word, assume the .com is owned, assume it is not cheap, and assume the owner has been offered money before.

Brokers take a percentage on top of the price. GoDaddy charges a $99.99 fee plus 20% of the sale. Sedo charges $69 plus 15–20%. MediaOptions takes 20%. On a $400,000 domain that is $80,000 of commission, which is worth knowing before you open the conversation.

Lease-to-own exists and is under-discussed. Escrow.com’s domain holding service runs roughly $25–40 a month plus the escrow fee, over terms from six months to five years. If the domain is the only thing standing between you and the name you want, paying monthly is usually more realistic than finding six figures.

Backorders are a lottery ticket, not a plan. DropCatch charges about $59 on a pay-on-success basis, SnapNames $79. They only matter if the current owner lets the registration lapse, and owners of valuable domains rarely do.

And domains that look abandoned usually are not. founder.com has served a Chinese technology group since 1996; from Europe it simply times out, which reads as dead and is not. Before you assume a domain is free for the taking, check the record rather than the browser.

The honest case for paying is the traffic you never see. Before Yahoo got hold of it, flicker.com — the spelling Flickr did not own — was reportedly drawing around 3.6 million unique visitors a year, overwhelmingly people typing what they assumed was the right address. That is the real cost of a name people have to spell carefully, and it does not appear in any analytics dashboard you control.

The academic work says the same thing at scale. One study found roughly 20% of the .com zone consists of domains that look like typos of other domains. Another found 95% of popular domains have typo variants registered against them, while only 1.63% to 9% of trademark owners defensively register their own — so the gap is being filled by somebody, and it is not the brand.

One useful finding if you are deciding which variants to buy: an analysis of seven billion DNS queries found that .co absorbs over 99% of .com typos. If you register one defensive domain, that is the one.

Look again at the five at the top. Dropbox waited two years, Tesla ten, Notion eight, Yahoo five — and every one of them built the company first and bought the domain later, out of money the company had made. Not one of them solved it at the start, because at the start none of them could afford to.

That gives you a fairly clear test:

• If the price is under a month of revenue and the name is genuinely confusing to say out loud, buy it and stop thinking about it.
• If it is more than that, pick a name you can have completely, or accept the variant and revisit when the company can pay without it hurting.
• Never let it delay the launch. Every company above shipped on the wrong domain for years. The domain was a rounding error against whether the product worked.

The failure mode is not choosing the second-best domain. It is spending three months and a lot of emotional energy on a decision that, measured against everything else in a company’s first year, barely registers.