Your .com Is Taken. Now What?

Your .com is taken. Of course it is. Someone registered it in 2004, put nothing on it, and has been paying about eleven dollars a year ever since to not use it.

So you scroll the alternatives. .io, .co, .ai, .app, .xyz, .dev, and forty others you've never heard of. They all work. Your site will load exactly the same on any of them. The only real differences are what people think when they see it, and what you hand over every year to keep it.

That second part is where people get caught.

The prices are not close to each other

Start with .com, because it's the baseline. Underneath every .com sits a hard floor: $10.26 to Verisign plus 20 cents to ICANN, which every registrar on earth pays. That floor goes up to $10.97 on 1 November 2026. What you actually pay is that floor plus whatever the registrar decides to add — which is why a .com renewal is about $13.98 at Namecheap and $21.99 at GoDaddy. Same domain. Same registry. Eight dollars of difference for nothing.

.net and .org sit close by. Not worth agonising over.

.co is the first real step up. Roughly $26 a year to renew, and the first year is often around $10, so year two arrives with a noticeable sting.

Then .io, which is where the tech tax starts. Renewals run somewhere around $47 at the cheapest end and $53 at a mainstream registrar like Dynadot. But the spread on .io is genuinely wild: registration prices across the market run from about $15 to over $125, against an average near $58. The gap between the cheapest and dearest .io is larger than the entire five-year cost of a .com. If you're buying one, comparing registrars isn't optional, it's most of the money.

.ai is the expensive one, and it has a trap in it. Prices run roughly $75 to $215 a year depending on where you look. Porkbun charges a flat $82.70 whether you're registering or renewing. GoDaddy advertises $49.99, which sounds like the best deal on the page until you read that it's a mandatory two-year term where year two costs $159.99. And .ai has a two-year minimum on renewals too, so the figure at checkout is rarely the annual figure. Read the term, not the number.

Then the dollar-store endings. .shop goes from about $1 to about $30. .xyz from about $1 to about $13. For a project you'll abandon in March, fine. For anything you're keeping, that first-year sticker isn't a price, it's a hook.

Prices checked July 2026. Registrars move them quarterly, so confirm at checkout.

Google doesn't care about your extension

This one comes up constantly, so let's kill it. Your extension does not affect your search rankings. A .xyz with good content beats a .com with bad content, every time.

The one real exception is country extensions. Use a .de and search engines will reasonably assume you're aimed at Germany. Useful if you're a Berlin bakery, limiting if you're not.

What the extension does affect is trust, which isn't the same thing and is arguably worth more.

Say it out loud in a noisy room

Here's the test. Imagine telling someone your domain over the noise at a bar.

"It's shipfast dot io."

A good chunk of them will type shipfast.com when they get home. That's just what happens, and it's worse with .co, which bleeds traffic to the matching .com constantly. It's precisely why whoever owns the .com is often perfectly happy to let you have the .co.

None of that means avoid these endings. Plenty of real companies run on a .io and nobody thinks twice. It means know what you're trading. If you sell to developers, .io and .dev read as completely normal. If your customers are people in your town looking for a plumber, get a .com, get a clumsier .com if you have to, but get the .com.

The part about country codes

.io, .co, .ai and .me aren't global extensions. They're country codes. .io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory. .ai belongs to Anguilla, and its registry moved to Identity Digital in January 2025.

In practice this has been fine for two decades and there are millions of these domains running happily right now.

But it's a legitimate reason .com is the lower-drama option for something you expect to still be running in 2036. If a territory's arrangements change, that happens several levels above you and there's nothing you can do about it from your end. Small risk. Worth ten seconds, not ten minutes.

Two things worth checking before you pay

Try harder on the .com first. Add "get" or "try" or "use". Try the plural. Try a second word. A slightly clumsier .com at $11 a year costs about $55 over five years. A .io at $50 costs $250. That's not a rounding error, that's a laptop.

Price the specific extension, not the registrar. This is the step nearly everyone skips. There is no such thing as a cheapest registrar. Cloudflare sells .com at cost and doesn't sell .ai at all. GoDaddy is aggressive on .com first-year and punishing on .ai renewals. The company that's cheapest for the ending you want is frequently not the one you've heard of.

And two costs nobody mentions until it's too late: letting a domain lapse and then wanting it back triggers a restore fee that typically runs $80 to $150, and ICANN locks a domain for 60 days after any transfer, so you can't shop your way out of a bad renewal on short notice. Move before the renewal notice, not after.

The extension changes what your domain sounds like and what it costs you annually. It doesn't make your site faster, better, or easier to find.

So pick the one your customers will actually type, then spend thirty seconds making sure you're not paying triple for it.