What is the most you have paid for personal or business reasons? What extension? What domain? Mask them out fully or partially if you want but knowing the length is helpful.
Never paid much for domains, but the biggest loss was exgfs.com<p>I registered it in 2005ish before that whole niche in porn took off, some dude offered me $100 3 days later, being young and naive I took it thinking it was a great flip. Year later I watched him sell it for $100,000. I learned my lesson that day.
Maybe 5-6 years ago I bought tgood.com for $300, negotiated down from $3,000. In 2014 I sold it to TGOOD Electric Co. out of China – their market cap at the time was ~$7B and a co-founder messaged me via Facebook. I was set on never selling it; that TGOOD was to become my VIRGIN brands. Over the years I tested different blog concepts on it. However, their offer was one I couldn't refuse and has provided a nice personal runway. My cousins law firm handled the dialog and it took 3-4 months from start to finish… since this nickname was originated by my birth name, I gave my parents about a third of the proceeds.
I sold a four-letter .org for $5000 once, original offer was $500 which I didn't think was enough. Whatever the buyer wanted to launch on it never got off the ground, and a few years later I was able to grab it back when it lapsed.
There is a domain I really want right now that is being squatted. Any advice HN? I already own the '.net' version so I don't really _need_ the '.com' version but I want it. I doubt it is a high value name and I am considering just sending the the admin listed in the WHOIS an email like "Hey, I will give you $50 for <i></i><i></i><i></i>.com, let me know." Is this a good approach or should I try to go thru an 'appraiser' or something like that.
$500<p>7 letters, .com address, six or seven years ago<p>Solid domain name, and I had an interesting product for it. Didn't materialize the way I hoped, so I shut it down. I've kept the domain though.<p>I've occasionally run across domains in the $5k range that were quite good, but I still seem to find good enough .com addresses that I've yet to resort to buying one. I'm working on a new product now that is a 5 letter .com address, I bought it straight from a registrar, and it's exactly what I was looking for.<p>I've probably only owned one that was stand-alone valuable. I bought a domain in 1997 via Network Solutions, and have held on to it since then. It's a six letter .com dictionary term.
I purchased myh2o.com for our SaaS billing platform (named H2O) in 2010 for $3500. I also purchased h2o.io sometime after that for $600. In 2009, an ISP client of ours, Rio Networks, sold rio.com for $450,000.
I purchased Texts.com while in high school (~10 years ago) for ~$15k. I had made a fair amount of money flipping domain names on sites like Namepros / DNForum / a few private forums. A mix of "tulip" LLL.com's, and then a few instances of snagging a name in the aftermarket and immediately flipping it to an "end user."<p>My biggest domain-fail was letting Naked-Celebs.com expire. I bought it for something like $300 in 2009 and forgot to transfer it to my main portfolio, and somehow let it drop... I still shudder thinking about that sometimes.
I think it was $2000. We were operating in several countries with the same brand and when entering a new country we needed that TLD. It was rightfully owned by a woman who happened to have the name as a nickname (registered years before our brand existed). Her website was static, outdated and of geocities type quality (stars background, animated icons). A friend of hers negotiated and I think we caught him off-guard on the phone. Our budget was multiple times that.<p>7 characters.
I was once contacted by a hollywood musician to buy iSingr.com. I wanted to sell for $500. My Friends convinced me to ask for $15000. And the buyer stopped responding :).
Not my own purchase, but my previous employer paid somewhere in the region of £1-2 million (I forget the exact figure) for a 2 letter .com which was actively being used by a Brazilian company. They were using the .com and the .com.br and just used the .com.br as their main domain after the sale.<p>It was a huge amount of money but it made sense seeing as the buyer was a business with a 2 letter name.
Never paid more than the standard registration fee for a name. Nearly all the names I have are .com; I have one .org and one .us. None of them are particularly interesting. I did get an email once inquiring about buying one of my domains, but I wasn't interested in selling so I never got an offer.
For a company I organised a $5k AUD purchase. The owner didn't counter offer and took the initial offer. I had $20k initial limit, and could have likely taken an increased premium back to the company successfully. If you get an offer treat that as an opening, not what someone is willing to pay.
Reading some of these replies, I have to shake my head at the people who are expecting 100x or 2000x "profit" on domain squatting.<p>I agree with supply and demand, and letting market forces dictate pricing etc etc.... but domain squatting is one of my biggest pet peeves out there.
I submitted a request for quote for hdd.com They replied back and said they'd accept nothing less than $100k. Seems ridiculous based on the numbers I'm seeing here.
I offered $15k for a 4 letter non-english word domain and was turned down. That was 10 years ago. Now they want $42k. Still sitting on it. It's some sort of broker.
$5,000 for ipvm.com 3 years ago, we started with ipvideomarket.info which was long and unwiedly and have been happy with what we paid to go to a 4 letter .com domain
Bought orch.in for 300$<p>Which left such a big hole in my poor little bank account (I am a college student)
But one year later, turns out it was worth it, every penny of it. :)
I bought joypath.com for 450, personal project.<p>purchases for employer<p>party-------.com for 5500<p>---force.com for 12000<p>-----lite.com for 11500
bsd.io -- registered it for something like $120 at the time. It lapsed during hard times and the registration fees hadn't yet dropped. Now someone is squatting on it.