Free domain name generators and how they work

Imagine you need to find a suitable domain name for a project, or your company or startup. Just a few years ago, we used to have a pretty straight forward approach to finding a perfect domain:

How we used to find great domains

First, you would try your product name, company name or light variations. If you were lucky, you paid somewhere around $10 and had a domain for life (with yearly renewals). Today, this straight-forward approach usually doesn't work anymore.

So, people have started to work in some variations. Most commonly, by adding some words to the domain, like ...hub, ...base, ...lab, ...hq, ...official, ...studio. This often works, but it's not perfect because users tend to forget what the addition was you picked for the domain. It's a lot harder to remember.

Then, a huge shift happened. Everyone started drifting away from .com domains, over to other TLDs. Anything from .net, .org, .io, .app seemed great, and it felt like the year 1999 all over again. All domain names were available again, if you were willing to forgoe the .com, that is.

Then, the trouble started

While .com domains stayed mostly stable in pricing ($10 a year, more or less), and all of the big providers (at the time, Google Domains, GoDaddy, NameCheap, NamePros) pretty much stuck to this, the story of other TLDs was quite a different one. Pricing for "the new domain extensions" started to go up, wildly. A brand-new .app domain could suddenly cost a $1,000 for new registrations. Other TLDs were even crazier (.blog, .studio).

This made things a lot more complicated. The only way to find a good domain now, was, to either invest a lot of money upfront, or to come up with a perfect alternative .com that made sense.

Free domain name generators

Some smart entrepreneurs came up with a solution. Products like instantdomainsearch.com started to come up with literally instant suggestions. You would start typing the domain name and with every press of a button, you would see if the domain was available and, most importantly, if some variations of that domain name may be a good alternative choice.

Their business model revolved around affiliate deals. You would click through and buy a domain, and the name generator would receive a small commission. Fine! There was, however, another problem: the alternative names these tools came up with just weren't that... great. Those tools were made before GPT and AI technology was around, and essentially were based on basic word lists, where random words were appended to the domain. That's not good enough!

The modern world: GPT-powered domain generators

The arrival of GPT-based name generators was a lot like the time alternative TLDs were the hype. With one important distinction: .coms are still very affordable, and GPT-based generators are tremendously effective at finding human-compatible names. Or, in other words, they come up with domain names that make sense to a human, are easy to remember, and still work with your product or company name, simply because GPTs can infer the context of your business and work from that.