January 2019—It’s a joke, but also reality, that the first step of starting a new software project is picking a name for it and buying a domain name. These days, the .com domain is usually already taken, making the search complicated.
But in fact, there are 1000+ other domain name extensions such as .chat, .work, or .cool, which you can cleverly integrate into the project name. Constraints foster creativity.
The usual domain search engines make searching for such domains complicated, they show a slow-loading plain list of options when you search a term.
This is where the idea of Domain Garden comes from.
February 2019—It turns out that ICANN, the central authority for domain name registration, provides daily downloads of all registered domain names, for most domain name extensions.
With this you can build a database of unavailable names, that can be queried instantly for all domain name extensions at once.
After writing some Go scipts to efficiently parse the large text files and track new additions, the database is ready.
It will take months of periodic maintenance to fix edge cases in the daily download pipeline, but the first version is done.
April 2019—On the UI side, the results are presented in a grid so you see a lot of options at once. (the central innovation of the project)
You also see where to buy the domains from most cheaply, because that varies by registry.
July 2019—After using the tool myself for a bit, I launch it on Reddit, Twitter, and Indie Hackers. And people are very encouraging!
There is some monetization with referral links, but I’m just happy that people find it useful, and that it spreads by word of mouth.
December 2023—It’s now years later, people still message me sometimes when the site breaks! This is so cool (but also sometimes annoying haha).
2025—I had to take this offline for now to save costs, which is very sad. Note to self: plan projects to continue running without major hosting cost or maintenance work!
