Get notified when a domain becomes available
A name you want is taken. It may not stay taken — but the window between a domain expiring and anyone being able to register it is narrow, badly documented, and easy to miss by a day.
dotsweep watches one for you and writes exactly once, when a registry confirms the name is registrable. Never on a guess: if a registry is unreachable or rate-limiting us, the watch waits rather than telling you a name is free when it is not.
What happens when a domain expires
Expiry is not release. A gTLD like .com moves through several states, and the name is unregisterable by you in all but the last one:
- Expired, auto-renew grace — roughly 0–45 days. The owner can renew at the normal price. Most expired names never leave this stage; expiry is usually an accident, and it gets fixed.
- Redemption period — about 30 days. The name is off the internet and the owner can still reclaim it, for a redemption fee of around $80–200. dotsweep reports this state as expiring.
- Pending delete — 5 days, and nothing can stop it. The name is going to drop.
- Dropped — the registry releases it and it is first-come.
ccTLDs set their own timings and some skip stages entirely, so treat the above as the gTLD shape rather than a universal schedule. The dates that matter are on the registry record: look up any domain to see its expiry and status codes.
Why a watch beats checking manually
A dropped name in demand is gone in minutes, and the drop time is not announced. Polling by hand means either checking constantly or missing it. dotsweep schedules its own checks from the registry's own expiry date — monthly while the date is far off, every six hours inside the drop window, hourly once the name is in redemption — so the alert lands close to the event without hammering a registry.
What this is not
This is an alert, not a backorder. We tell you the moment a name is registrable; we do not attempt to register it for you, and we have no privileged access to the drop. For contested names, a drop-catching service that bids at the registry will beat any human acting on an email. For the ordinary case — a name nobody else is racing you for — an alert is the whole job, and it costs nothing.
Two ways to be told
Telegram is the fastest: message
@dotsweep_bot with a domain name and
it watches it. No email address, nothing to confirm, and /list and
/stop manage it.
Email works from any result on the search page — find a taken name and press Notify me. You confirm the address once, and the watch runs until the name is free.
The rule this inherits
Every answer dotsweep gives distinguishes a registry-confirmed fact from an estimate, and a notification only ever fires on the confirmed kind. A throttled registry looks exactly like an available domain to a naive checker — it is the one wrong answer that costs money, and here it would arrive in your inbox with a link attached. How registries actually behave under load →