Journal · Guides
.com, .io or .ai? How to choose a domain extension
The extension is part of your name, and the part most likely to cost you later. A practical way to pick one, with the traps nobody mentions.
People remember a name and guess the ending. Whatever they guess, they type. Every extension is a bet on that guess, so it is worth knowing what you are betting on.
.com: the default you never outgrow
Say “kova” to someone and they will type kova.com. If you own kova.io instead, some of those visitors land on whoever owns the .com. That is why a taken .com is not a neutral fact: look at what lives there before you decide it doesn’t matter.
A parked page is an opening. An active business in your field is a stop sign.
If the .com is free at a normal price, take it and move on. It is almost always the cheapest to register and the easiest to say.
.io and .ai are country codes in startup clothes
.io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory and .ai to Anguilla. Neither was designed for software; the technical crowd adopted them, and the registries noticed. Two things follow.
- A country code lives as long as the country does. .yu disappeared with Yugoslavia. In 2010 Libya’s registry took down vb.ly, a link shortener, over its content. The islands behind .io are the subject of a UK–Mauritius agreement. Nobody is predicting that .io goes away, but you are renting from a government, not a neutral registry.
- Prices are set for a market that will pay. Renewals on .ai in particular are well above .com.
The first-year price is bait
Registrars discount the first year and recover it on the second. Before you commit, read the renewal column, not the headline. In domainer.gg that is the “then / yr” figure next to each registrar, and it is the number you will be paying for as long as you keep the name.
The new endings that do a job
.app and .dev are run by Google, and both are on the browser preload list for HTTPS: a site on either simply won’t load over plain HTTP. That is a small free guarantee of a secure site, and a good reason for a developer tool to pick one. .tools, .studio and .shop describe what you do, which helps a stranger who sees only the link.
They also look unfamiliar to people outside tech. A neighbourhood bakery on .studio will get typo’d into .com.
A rule of thumb
- Consumer or local business: .com, or your country’s own ending (.ch, .de, .co.uk) if your customers are there.
- Developer tool: .dev or .io, with the .com if you can get it.
- AI product: .ai if you accept the renewal, otherwise .com and a name that makes the point itself.
- The .com is an active competitor: change the name, not the extension. A .io that sits next to a well-known .com is a support inbox full of other people’s customers.
Don’t buy ten
One extension you use beats six you park. Add a second only if a real user would reach it by mistake, and point it at the first.