Domain Finder

Search and recommend good domain names to buy. Describe a product or idea; the app brainstorms brandable names (AI + rule-based combos), checks real availability via RDAP, and returns a ranked list of buy candidates.

Source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 (SPDX-License-Identifier: Elastic-2.0) — see License.

Connect to the MCP server

Domain Finder is also a remote MCP server — check a brand name across domains and the GitHub / npm / PyPI namespaces from any MCP-capable agent.

• Endpoint: https://domain-finder-theta.vercel.app/api/mcp (Streamable HTTP)
• Tools:
  • check_name — check whether one or more candidate names are free across domains and the GitHub / npm / PyPI namespaces, in a single call.
  • generate_names — generate candidate names from a description, each pre-checked for domain availability; feed the favorites into check_name.
• Read-only, and no credentials required — nothing to sign up for, no keys to paste. Safe to connect.

Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json) and any client with native Streamable-HTTP support:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "domain-finder": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://domain-finder-theta.vercel.app/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) — bridge a remote server with mcp-remote:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "domain-finder": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-remote", "https://domain-finder-theta.vercel.app/api/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

How it works

query ─▶ generate ─▶ check availability ─▶ rank ─▶ results
         (AI + rules)   (RDAP)              (0–100 score)

• Generation (lib/generate.ts) — merges three sources of candidates:

  • Rule-based combos: keyword extraction (stopword-filtered) × prefixes/ suffixes (get, try, -ly, -hq, -app, …), shorter-first.
  • AI brainstorm (optional): Vercel AI SDK via AI Gateway (generateObject
    • zod). Degrades gracefully to rule-based when no API key is present.
  • Domain hacks (lib/hacks.ts): read the word across the dot — delicio.us, bit.ly, recip.es. Built from IANA's full TLD list; needs no API. These ignore the TLD filter by design (the word picks the zone), so they have their own toggle.
  • Labels are deduped, capped, and expanded across the selected TLDs (round-robin so every label gets its .com before any gets a second TLD).

• Availability (lib/availability.ts) — RDAP behind a swappable AvailabilityProvider interface. Resolves each TLD to its authoritative registry RDAP server via the IANA bootstrap file (+ curated overrides), then queries the registry directly. Retries on 429.

• Status taxonomy (lib/rdap-status.ts) — "taken" isn't one thing. Modelled on Domainr's taxonomy, each domain gets a status and a coarse bucket:

  bucket	statuses	meaning
  registrable	available	buy it now, at retail
  dropping	deleting, expiring	in pendingDelete/redemption — backorder territory
  aftermarket	parked	owned, but nameservers say "for sale"
  unavailable	active, reserved	registered and in use
  unknown	unknown	no RDAP server for the TLD, or an error

  All derived free from RDAP's RFC 8056 status codes, expiration event, and nameservers. deleting domains also get an estimatedDropAt (pendingDelete is a fixed ~5-day window).

• Ranking (lib/rank.ts) — a 0–100 score from availability (45), TLD desirability (20), length (20), cleanliness/no-hyphens-or-digits (10), and a brandability nudge (5, hack > AI > combo). Sorted by bucket first, then score — so "buy it now" always outranks "might be gettable".

Swapping RDAP for a paid registrar API later (pricing + real buy flow) only touches lib/availability.ts — nothing else in the pipeline knows the source.

Watchlist

Track a domain, get emailed when it enters the drop path, hand off to a backorder service. This is a scheduler around availabilityProvider.check(), not new availability logic.

cron ─▶ due-queue ─▶ check ─▶ transition? ─▶ alert (deleting | available)
        (next_check_at)       (watch_events)   deduped via `alerts`

• Adaptive due-queue (lib/cadence.ts) — every domain carries a next_check_at; the poller only touches what's due. Cadence follows status: far-off active weekly → expiry <30d or redemption daily → pendingDelete every 6h → hourly inside 24h of the estimated drop. RDAP load stays proportional to how interesting a domain is, not how many watches exist.
• State is keyed by domain, not by watch (lib/db/schema.ts). A hundred people watching the same short .com is one row, one RDAP call, one transition, fanned out to a hundred inboxes. Load scales with unique domains observed, not users × domains — which matters because registries don't sell capacity.
• Transition log (watch_events) is the source of truth. Alerts fire only on a change, and alerts has unique(watch_id, event_id) so a cron retry can't double-send.
• Only two statuses alert: deleting (pendingDelete — the fixed ~5-day window, i.e. the last moment a backorder can be placed) and available. Everything else is logged and shown in the UI but stays silent.
• An unknown is not a transition. A 429 or timeout means "we couldn't tell", not "the domain changed" — the last known status stands, and the check backs off exponentially (1h, 2h, 4h … capped at a day).
• TLDs we can't observe are refused at watch time. .co/.es/.at/.gg have no public RDAP server, so a watch on them could never fire. Better to say so than to accept it and silently never alert.
• Free watches are capped at 3 per email (FREE_WATCH_LIMIT in lib/watch.ts).

Identity is an email plus an unguessable manage token — no accounts, no sessions, no users table. The token rides in alert links and authenticates /watch/<token>.

Running the watchlist locally

# any Postgres will do
docker run -d --name df-pg -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=domainfinder \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=domainfinder -e POSTGRES_DB=domainfinder \
  -p 5433:5432 postgres:16-alpine

cp .env.example .env.local   # set DATABASE_URL + CRON_SECRET
npm run db:push              # create the tables
npm run dev

Without RESEND_API_KEY alerts are printed to the console rather than sent, so the whole flow is drivable with no third-party signup. Trigger a poll by hand:

curl -H "authorization: Bearer $CRON_SECRET" localhost:3000/api/cron/poll

Scheduling in production

.github/workflows/poll.yml hits /api/cron/poll hourly. Vercel's Hobby cron only fires once per day, which can burn most of a ~5-day pendingDelete warning, so the schedule lives in GitHub Actions instead. Set the POLL_URL and CRON_SECRET repository secrets. GHA cron is best-effort and can lag a few minutes — fine for a multi-day warning, and nothing here depends on being punctual.

Tests

npm test

lib/rdap-status.test.ts and lib/cadence.test.ts are pure. lib/poll.test.ts drives the real database with a fake availability provider — pendingDelete and redemptionPeriod are too rare in the wild to find on demand, and they're exactly what this feature exists to catch. It skips when DATABASE_URL is unset.

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:3000

Search works with no configuration — availability (RDAP) and rule-based generation need no keys. To enable AI brainstorming, copy .env.example to .env.local and set an AI Gateway key:

cp .env.example .env.local
# then set AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY=...

The watchlist is the only part that needs a database; search keeps working without one (getDb() is lazy and only throws when a watch route calls it). See Watchlist above.

API

POST /api/search

// request
{ "query": "vegan meal delivery", "tlds": [".com", ".io"], "useAi": true }

// response
{ "query": "...", "results": [ { "domain": "...", "score": 92, "availability": {...}, ... } ],
  "meta": { "generated": 45, "checked": 45, "aiUsed": false, "availabilityProvider": "rdap", "tookMs": 1200 } }

Notes / limitations

• TLD coverage. IANA's RDAP bootstrap covers ~1199 of 1438 zones and skews gTLD; the gap is ccTLDs, which is exactly what domain hacks use. Verified overrides are in OVERRIDES (lib/availability.ts): .io/.me/.sh/.ac, .de, .us. No reachable endpoint was found for .co/.es/.at/.gg, so those report unknown rather than guess. Add more if you find them.
• Parking detection is high-precision, low-recall. It reliably flags ordinary domains parked on Sedo/Bodis-style nameservers, but misses premium ones — most sit behind Cloudflare/AWS where the signal is invisible. Absence of parked proves nothing. Real aftermarket data needs a paid source.
• RDAP tells you registered vs not — not price. Pricing/buy needs a registrar API (the interface is ready for it). "Buy" links currently point to a Namecheap search; backorderUrl() points at DropCatch for dropping domains. Swapping in affiliate links is a one-line change in app/page.tsx.
• You can't win a drop by polling this app. Professional drop-catchers hold hundreds of registrar connections. The useful build is a watchlist that alerts and hands off to a backorder service — see the wiki for the design.

License

Source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 (SPDX-License-Identifier: Elastic-2.0). You may inspect, self-host, and modify the code freely. What you may not do is provide it to third parties as a hosted or managed service that exposes a substantial set of its features — i.e. running it as a competing hosted service is not permitted. Full terms in LICENSE.