dotsweep vs DomScan
A broad domain, DNS, WHOIS and security intelligence catalogue, priced in credits, with availability as one endpoint among several dozen.
| dotsweep | DomScan | |
|---|---|---|
| No key | YesNo key, no account, no signup. curl https://dotsweep.com/check/example.com works from a cold start. |
NoAn X-API-Key header on every call, issued from a dashboard after signup. Their pricing page says no credit card is needed to start. |
| Admits doubt | YesA registry that is throttled, timed out or publishes no RDAP resolves to estimated, never available. A 429 from one registry does not become a confident answer about another one on the same host. |
YesTheir documented response types available as boolean | null, and carries a per-result confidence and error alongside a confidence_summary object with ambiguous_count, error_count, authoritative_count, heuristic_count, fallback_chain, confidence_level, determinacy_rate and ambiguity_reason. That is a more detailed account of doubt than our three values. |
| Renewal + term | YesRegistration and renewal are separate figures, a first-year discount is flagged as a promotion, and an extension the registry sells only in multi-year terms is multiplied out so the leading number is what leaves your account. | Not documentedThe availability response documented on the page we read carries no price field. Their catalogue lists a separate Domain Pricing endpoint, which we did not read, so we cannot say what it returns. |
| Eligibility | Partly38 extensions have had their registry policy read, 33 of them with an eligibility rule, each citing the registry's own page and the date it was read. An extension that is not in that set asserts nothing. | Not documentedNot mentioned in the availability documentation we read. |
| Free tier | Yes120 requests a minute, counted as requests rather than domains, and a batch endpoint carrying 10 domains each. No daily or monthly ceiling and no credit balance, so the rate is the whole quota. Edge cache hits are not counted at all. | PartlyTheir pricing page says "You get 10,000 free credits per month (resets on the 1st)", with credit packs from $10 for 50,000 credits that do not expire. A credit is spent per call, so the free tier is an amount rather than a rate. |
| Assistant-ready | YesA remote MCP server at /mcp over the same handlers, addable as one URL with no account and no key, plus /llms.txt so an assistant that only fetches can still call it. |
YesThey publish an MCP integration and list it among what the free tier includes. The pages we read do not say whether it can be called without an API key. |
Where DomScan is the better choice
Written first because a comparison written by one of the two products is worth nothing if it cannot say this.
- A documented third state for availability: the availability field is typed boolean or null, with a confidence field, an error field and a whole summary object accounting for ambiguous and heuristic results. That is a finer-grained report of its own uncertainty than ours.
- Several dozen endpoints past availability, covering WHOIS, DNS, SSL, typosquatting, reputation, monitoring and bulk datasets, where we answer three questions and stop.
- A monthly allowance stated as one number a bulk job can be budgeted against, and credit packs that do not expire, rather than a per-minute rate a job has to be paced against.
Where dotsweep is different
- No key, no account, no signup.
curl https://dotsweep.com/check/example.comworks from a cold start. - A registry that is throttled, timed out or publishes no RDAP resolves to
estimated, neveravailable. A 429 from one registry does not become a confident answer about another one on the same host. - Registration and renewal are separate figures, a first-year discount is flagged as a promotion, and an extension the registry sells only in multi-year terms is multiplied out so the leading number is what leaves your account.
- 38 extensions have had their registry policy read, 33 of them with an eligibility rule, each citing the registry's own page and the date it was read. An extension that is not in that set asserts nothing.
- A remote MCP server at
/mcpover the same handlers, addable as one URL with no account and no key, plus/llms.txtso an assistant that only fetches can still call it.
The unconfirmed-rather-than-available rule is the one worth explaining,
because it is the only wrong answer in this category that costs somebody money.
A registry that is rate-limiting you often phrases the refusal in words a parser
reads as "no such domain", so the naive result of a throttled lookup is a
confident "available" for a name somebody already owns. dotsweep asserts this in
its test suite in both engines, and marks the answer estimated
instead.
Is dotsweep better than DomScan?
Not at everything, and not for every job. DomScan does this better: A documented third state for availability: the availability field is typed boolean or null, with a confidence field, an error field and a whole summary object accounting for ambiguous and heuristic results. That is a finer-grained report of its own uncertainty than ours. dotsweep answers a different question: it needs no key or account, it returns the renewal price and the minimum term rather than the advertised first-year figure, it says who is allowed to register the extension, and it reports a throttled or unreachable registry as unconfirmed rather than available.
What DomScan documents
- https://domscan.net/docs/check-availability, read 2026-08-01
- https://domscan.net/pricing, read 2026-08-01
How we know this, and what we did not do
Every claim about another product here was read from that vendor's own documentation, and each one is listed with the page and the date it was read. No figure comes from a review, a listicle or another comparison.
We did not benchmark any of these services. Nothing on this page reports a measurement, and where a row says "not documented" it means their documentation did not answer the question and we did not test it. It is not a quiet way of saying no. Getting that distinction wrong is how the rest of a comparison table stops being worth reading, and it is the same rule the rest of this site follows about extensions whose registry policy nobody has read.
If something here is out of date or wrong, the date next to it is there so you can tell which, and support@dotsweep.com reaches a person.
The one claim here that is measured rather than cited
Every row above comes from a vendor's own documentation. One thing does not, because no vendor documents it: what a checker concludes when the registry refuses to answer. That is testable, and the test is published with its method and a way to run it against your own — including why the obvious version of the experiment, waiting for a real rate limit and asking everyone at once, cannot work.
Check a name without signing up for anything
curl https://dotsweep.com/check/example.com