Well it’s official, .DEV is now in General Availability which means that anyone can buy one, as long as they’re able to navigate the somewhat complicated pricing that Google has setup. The pricing for .DEV is honestly one of the strangest I’ve seen yet, and while there is definitely some logic to it, figuring that logic out is pretty challenging.
Some domains you can register for around $12, others cost $64, and some are between $100 – $200, others are some random number in the $400 range, some are in the $900 range. I guess the pricing has to do what what some people at Google thought particular names “could” sell for, but I think a lot of these arbitrary prices are just going to keep people out of the .DEV space in the early days.
I personally don’t think .DEV is going to be a good investment but as a software developer myself I did buy a handful of names today. I told myself I wouldn’t spent more than $100 and since when I got o Vegas I typically let myself spend about $100 on craps, I figured, this would be a similar gamble with probably somewhat similar odds. At the same time, I did pick up one .DEV domain that I did really want and that I plan to hold onto forever – morganlinton.dev. I’ll likely build a personal site here linking to Github and sharing some of the coding projects that I’ve done for fun over the years.
Otherwise, here’s the other .DEV names I bought today:
TQDM.dev – a popular Python library that I’m a fan of
Sting.dev – solid one-word name and I could see plenty of libraries/algorithms being called Sting
SKLearn.dev – I was pretty excited to get this one, it’s my favorite Python machine learning library
Nickle.dev – another one-word name I found for $12
MorganLinton.dev – my favorite!
MatPlotLib.dev – another Python library I’m a big fan of
Dazzle.dev – another one-word .DEV that was available for $12
So I spent a total of $84, got MorganLinton.dev and am genuinely excited about SKLearn.dev which I think I will likely develop into a resource for other SciKit Learn developers since it’s my personal favorite machine learning library. I’ll probably do the same with MatPlotLib.dev as this is a pretty badass math library in Python and I think I could probably put together a fun little mini-site with some good info for people who want to get started with the library.
My expectations – $0 in profit, a few names that are fun to build out, and likely other names that I drop next year and turn out to be a waste of money, for $84, worth it for me. For anyone planning on buying up a bunch of .DEV domains as a “good” investment, plan on an ROI of 0% but if you have fun while doing it, go for it. Just remember, .COM is where you should be making your investments as a Domainer.
Did you buy any .DEV names today?
