The boring truth
I just wanted a domain. It took weeks.
I had a product. I needed a name. I opened ChatGPT.
"Names for an AI coding workspace for marketers." It gave me fifty. Some were funny. Some I actually liked. I opened Namecheap. Started checking.
Taken. Taken. Taken. Premium, $3,200. Taken. .com is parked at $4,500. Taken. Taken.
Twenty minutes in, I had zero candidates.
I went back to the chat. "Try shorter." Another fifty names. Same dance. Two okay names survived the registrar check. Both felt forced.
I tried a different angle. "What if the name was a place?" "What if it was a metaphor for safety?" "What if it was a verb?" The model was patient. The registrar wasn't.
Hundreds of ideas. Maybe a dozen still available at the .com. Available didn't mean good. aibakery.com was free. So was secureshell.dev. Neither felt right.
At some point I started keeping the available ones in a notepad on my desktop. A graveyard for "checked but didn't pick." Just so when the next round of brainstorming spit out something I liked, I had a pile of pre-checked names to anchor against.
The notepad grew faster than my conviction did.
What the registrar kept saying
domain-check.log
buildailaunch.com→taken
flowloop.com→$2,800
shipfast.io→not .com
marketerai.com→parked, make offer
sandbox.dev→not .com
studio.app→not .com
aimarketing.com→$8,400
claude-for-marketers.com→too long
codecraft.com→taken
launchpad.io→not .com
prompt-studio.com→taken
growthkit.com→$11,000
aiagent.com→premium, $26k
webcraft.ai→not .com
cloudagent.com→taken
brandable-name-here.com→obviously taken
browseragent.com→taken
promptforge.com→$5,200
launchstudio.com→taken
creatorlab.com→$7,400
nodbay.com→available ✓
buildailaunch.com→taken
flowloop.com→$2,800
shipfast.io→not .com
marketerai.com→parked, make offer
sandbox.dev→not .com
studio.app→not .com
aimarketing.com→$8,400
claude-for-marketers.com→too long
codecraft.com→taken
launchpad.io→not .com
prompt-studio.com→taken
growthkit.com→$11,000
aiagent.com→premium, $26k
webcraft.ai→not .com
cloudagent.com→taken
brandable-name-here.com→obviously taken
browseragent.com→taken
promptforge.com→$5,200
launchstudio.com→taken
creatorlab.com→$7,400
nodbay.com→available ✓
How I finally picked
Eventually I stopped trying to be clever. Short. Pronounceable. Not a real word. Couldn't be confused for someone else. The .com had to be free without a "premium" upcharge.
I picked Nodbay. I didn't hate it after saying it out loud ten times. That was the bar. Bought the .com that night.
What about the rest
I looked at the notepad. Thousands of names sitting in a file called maybe.txt. All checked. All available at the .com. All written down in case my first pick fell through.
Felt weird to delete them. So I'm putting them here. Free list. No login. No newsletter. If one of them is the name you've been looking for, grab it at any registrar (it'll cost you the usual ~$10-15/year, not me).
If you ship something with one of these names, send me a link. I'd genuinely love to see it.
Kristjan, founder of Nodbay
A short sermon
Why I only kept .com names.
Type a brand name into your address bar. Watch your browser autocomplete .com. That's not a fluke. It's forty years of muscle memory, and every TLD launched since then has been fighting it.
Tell someone your domain is spark.ai. A real chunk of them will type spark.com anyway. Some won't bother correcting. That's your traffic landing on a parked page or, worse, a competitor.
A .com is the only TLD that doesn't need an explanation.
Every non-.com is a footnote. "It's bloom.app, not bloom.com." "It's getstellar.io, with a g." Each conversation costs a sentence. A .com lets the name carry itself.
And only .com has a real secondary market. Premium names like vault.com or agent.com change hands for serious money because, eventually, someone will need that exact name and won't want to explain why their URL ends in something obscure. The newer TLDs don't have anything close to it. Some aren't even fully owned, just rented from registries whose policies can shift overnight. Ask anyone holding a .ai domain through the recent Anguilla price hikes.
You probably don't care about resale value. But the existence of that market is what makes .com defensible. The rest are rentals dressed up as ownership.
That's why my notepad only kept .com candidates. And it's why this list is .com only. Every name below is a real .com that was actually unregistered at the time of the last check, and registers for the normal ~$10-15/year. No premium upcharge. No "make an offer."