YC startups are abandoning .com

vlucas 1 hour ago |

> YC startups are abandoning .com

They are not "abandoning" .com domains. They are just really hard to find available or cheap enough to buy, so they launch with something else instead!

.com will always be king

manueltgomes 1 hour ago | |

Bingo. either you bough a .com a while ago or you have to pay a lot.

A while ago we had the .ly domains. Now .ai. Things change depending on "fashion" if you can call it that.

DanielHB 1 hour ago | | |

Oh god my company just switched to .io and that was a huge PITA. I hope we don't go .ai...

robin_reala 1 hour ago | | |

You just switched to .io knowing that it might be decommissioned in the not-too-distant future?

computomatic 1 hour ago | | |

Perhaps they finally finished their migration off .su

applfanboysbgon 1 hour ago | | |

It would shock me if that domain were actually allowed to be killed off by pure bureaucracy. I would like to believe that at some point bureaucracy must give way to concerns for the humans it serves, and if nothing else there is enough money involved with the industry that uses it that they'll probably be able to lobby effectively, one way or another.

khy 1 hour ago | |

Nobody goes there anymore, its too crowded.

charlieyu1 1 hour ago | |

Maybe. Still wild to find startups getting millions can’t afford to buy a .com domain

jeffyaw 1 hour ago | | |

it's not that they can't afford to buy one. it's that they're not available. and now a lot of other tlds have gained traction so it's now reasonable to consider others.

layer8 1 hour ago | | |

I would assume that for most foo.ai domains, foo-ai.com would also be available. So it’s more about naming preferences, and sometimes lack of imagination for coming up with an available name.

xhkkffbf 1 hour ago | | |

The squatters really jack up the prices. Yet somehow they pay pennies to squat on domains for decades. It's really a scandal.

CodesInChaos 1 hour ago |

Which gTLDs are reliable besides the classics (com, net, org,...)? By that I mean that the TLD owner won't screw you over a few years from now, for example by raising prices?

I kind of like the idea to use .com for the marketing site, and .app for the actual web-app.

tosh 1 hour ago |

.com is evergreen but it's more and more difficult to get good .com names

I wouldn't call this 'abandoning .com' though

it's basically still .com dominated with a good chunk .ai

and I guess the ones with good .com are keeping the .com

Cider9986 1 hour ago |

.st is cool because they allow US-legal content and it's pretty cheap. I don't think it will be popular with companies but I like it for personal sites.

codegeek 1 hour ago |

.ai is the new .io but nothing will beat .com. Even Paul Graham has said that.

nadis 1 hour ago | |

Lest we forget, the PG essay: https://paulgraham.com/name.html

closetheloopdev 1 hour ago | | |

While reading the essay, I could not stop thinking about the literal "X" company which was formerly known as Twitter :D. It's like X is no longer a variable but a constant.

the__alchemist 1 hour ago |

Is non .com/.org, and hyphens still haram? I registered a new domain last week; I went with non-hyphenated .com. More verbose than ideal, but I chose based on my previous understanding.

I remember .ly was a thing for a while, then the tech companies would do *ly.com instead.

Grombobulous 1 hour ago |

If you take .ai out of it, .com is still dominant.

mojuba 1 hour ago | |

Exactly, and nothing will ever match the "prestige" of .com

.ai is also kind of cool right now but it will probably lose its appeal after some years when everything will become AI and the world will get tired of the term.

But .com is still at the top of the food chain. If you can survive for a few years, raise your series A/B, you will likely have enough money to acquire your sexy single-word .com name.

charlieyu1 1 hour ago | | |

Just found out the great ol’ command.com is taken by somebody random

dhosek 1 hour ago | | |

Many of the “good” simple names were grabbed by folks when registration was free in th 90s.

I’m still annoyed that thanks to a missed payment, I lost quixote.com.

cma 1 hour ago |

"A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So 1/26 of their round. This is the time we live in; one shocking number counterbalances the other."

https://x.com/paulg/status/2083628660708561075

Was that a .xyz?

FlamingMoe 1 hour ago |

They will certainly buy the .com once they reach a certain level of stability.

CollinEMac 1 hour ago |

I thought .dev and .app would be more popular actually. The rapid increase in .ai makes sense though.

405126121 1 hour ago | |

From personal experience .dev is a little weird. For one thing its on the HSTS preload list, enforcing https. You cannot make a http://... request to a .dev domain from most browsers. I found this out the hard way after trying to use .dev for... development.

CodesInChaos 1 hour ago | | |

I understand using http on localhost and in some cases local domains accessible within the LAN. But I don't see much point in using http for public domains, especially since browsers apply many restrictions to insecure origins (http://*.localhost is considered secure).

xhkkffbf 1 hour ago | | |

That's a deal breaker for me. Who has the time to set up full crypto protocols when just noodling around?

jdw64 1 hour ago |

.com — in RFC 920, it originally meant 'commercial.' But come to think of it, a lot of recent startups seem to be selling things that aren't really commercial at all. So maybe they're actually heading in the right direction.

cakbeslik 1 hour ago |

I never thought domains are actually uper important for startups. .com was always cool, then ther was an .io madness, never liked it, still go with .com or .co

rvz 1 hour ago |

At the end of the day, .com will still remain the most valuable and all startups will grow up into buying a .com

benatkin 1 hour ago | |

Counter-example: Alphabet doesn't have alphabet.com

CodesInChaos 1 hour ago | | |

They have google.com, which is the brand they use towards customers. The Alphabet brand is little more than a stock ticker.

newleaf 54 minutes ago | | |

They use abc.xyz though, which is fun at least.

SJMG 1 hour ago | | |

They have abc.xyz

philipwhiuk 1 hour ago | | |

Counter-counter point: It's not really used in branding either by any of the child companies. So they don't need it.

rvz 1 hour ago | | |

Who ever has alphabet.com will be able to sell it for 7 figures anyway, which is the point.

ggcr 46 minutes ago | | |

TIL that alphabet.com belongs to BMW group

thm 1 hour ago |

Anything other than a .com for a commercial site screams gimmick and immediately strips away most of its credibility. Go .com or go home.

jeffyaw 1 hour ago | |

this sounds like you're stuck in 2010.

gumby 1 hour ago | | |

Nope: it surprised me too, but we did a small survey and unless you’re a nerd, anything not ending in either com or your own nation’s TLD structure is considered dodgy and/or hard to type (.co being a notorious case — people type .com instead).

This is mitigated slightly by the fact that people don’t use URIs much any more and even if they do they usually type something into a search bar or chat bot which DWIMs what they typed anyway.