Domain Sniped on Launch Day | Hacker News Reader

Domain Sniped on Launch Day

kill-saas.com

17 pointsskilldeliver45 comments

"Sniped" makes it sound like they did something wrong, but they didn't. I reject the idea at the end that there were ethical lines crossed. You need to buy your domain when you name the project, not when you release it. If you don't have the domain then you don't have the name. Buying the domain is naming it. Take the lesson for next time.

How is it not unethical to grab a domain you don't need and had no intention of buying until you learned someone else was interested in it? Especially since it usually involves extorting money from the would-be buyer.

I fully agree you need to buy the domain as soon as you name your project, and that's where this person went wrong, but that doesn't make domain sniping any more ethical.

Completely agree. GP might be mixing up legal with ethical, which is quite common. The grabber's actions were performed intentionally, in bad faith.

There is no evidence that the person who bought the domain name in bad faith. The blog post is suggesting that someone is literally scraping GitHub and buying the domain name of every single public repo.

The MUCH more likely scenario is that someone simply thought of the same name and bought it.

> The blog post is suggesting that someone is literally scraping GitHub and buying the domain name of every single public repo.

I think you are severely underestimating how often this sort of behaviour happens.

Watching folks build something, seeing them prep to launch it, then buying the domain in response to that (in the hope that they'll pay more for it)?

Totally legal (and IMO should be!), but anyone doing that is absolutely crossing an ethical line.

Totally legal

Even if it steps on a trademark?

You have to admit though that scraping Github for project names and buying the domains is a sleazy way of making money

We have only the OP's word that this is actually what happened, and there's no way they could know that. The author also admits to having leaked their Discord key and accidentally leaving the GitHub repository public; their technical competence is in question here. It almost reads like a creative writing assignment. How would anyone have known he was about to register the domain?

I'm sure this did happen but given the followup post (https://kill-saas.com/posts/from-0-to-5) it seems like the author is mostly playing up the experience as a way to advertise his product. Mentioning the vibe coding, the Discord key, and leaving the GitHub repository public feels a little like this might be clickbait.

Yeah I'm not with OP either. The write-up is clearly marketing for their site. However buying domains that others might need is not very nice.

Definitely sleazy. Not sure if it's a good way to make money. People can just get a different domain name, like OP did. And a small project that's not paying for a closed github repo, is unlikely to shell out extra for their domain name.

For well-funded corporate projects it makes more sense; those cost more to rename, and paying extra for the domain name they want is nothing to them.

I had that bad experience recently. I've been putting a lot of work into thinking the details of a new project. A year! Then, I decided to buy the domain, finally, this January. I knew it was free. Only to discover that someone had bought the domain 20 days ago. That felt sore. I had to come up with a new name.

That's life. Lesson learned.

You knew it was free because you did a lookup with the registrar's search tool? Scummy domain registrars are known to buy up domains that their users search for if they don't buy it immediately. Always use the ICANN whois tool and nothing else.

Nope. It is sniping and it's a dick move. You have the name whenever you decide that's what you're calling the project. Registering a domain name for it is only a matter of hosting.

And yes, interferring with someone else hosting their project is wrong. If you don't want a domain for yourself, don't buy it. Messing with people makes you a dick and trying to buy something only to re-sell it makes you a parasite.

Domain squatting, shoud this have been the intention here, is obviously also wrong and often used for illegal activity.

There's just no world where this person doesn't have a right to complain because clearly they are the victim of someone else being a dick.

I usually give nicknames for concepts projects for this reason and others. even the dev subdomain points to the nickname before the domain is purchased.

sightly related, movies productions also have "Working Titles" before release to disguise project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_title

Software companies do this too. Never underestimate a marketing department’s ability to come up with a new silly name right before launch of a product you’ve poured quarters of work into.

A good reminder to not bikeshed the codebase keeping up with the latest name for something, as tempting as it is. A note in the README should suffice.

Killsaas.org and killsaas.net are available to buy. Why aren't you getting these domains? Yes, owning the .com is better, but you've already mentioned that the project is a public benefit one. In that case, .org and .net seem pretty appropriate. I'm curious—why is there so little interest in .org and .net domains?

There should be some regulatory mechanism for domains if the owner doesn’t use them for something meaningful, they should pay and increased price for it, and/or lose the ownership after a certain amount of time.

They way how it currently works is bad for the SaaS/app developers, bad for the content creators, and bad for the users.

It is ridiculous that nowadays you cannot buy a good domain name, because someone mass registered all of the meaningful combination of words in every existing tld, in hope that they can sell some of them for a few thousand dollars to someone who is willing to pay for it.

Not to mention these obviously unethical cases like this.

> There should be some regulatory mechanism for domains if the owner doesn’t use them for something meaningful, they should pay and increased price for it, and/or lose the ownership after a certain amount of time.

this sounds absolutely terrible for ADHD. it can sometimes take 3-5 years or longer for me to make good on a project.

I can totally relate to this. But if there won't be the pressure coming from shortage of good domain names, you could register once you finished your project.

> you could register once you finished your project.

that is exactly what was attempted here only to fail due to the squatter

>There should be some regulatory mechanism for domains if the owner doesn’t use them for something meaningful, they should pay and increased price for it, and/or lose the ownership after a certain amount of time.

There is, they're called "trademarks".

Trademarks only help after you've built something and are recognized as a brand. They don’t help indie developers, small startups, or creators at the starting point who just want to launch a project with a reasonable, memorable domain name. On top of that, pursuing a trademark or legal dispute over a domain isn’t approachable for most people—it’s time-consuming, expensive, and often out of reach for solo devs or small teams.

The current system encourages mass domain hoarding purely for profit, which ends up killing innovation and creativity. Trademarks don’t solve that, and they’re not meant to.

It is frustrating and this is why you don’t want to wait till launch day. As soon as you know it’s more than an inkling of an idea, get those domains. Most are cheap, and easy to let go if you decide it isn’t for you anyway.

Years ago, this used to happen a lot because registrars could grab a domain for a short period without any cost - so some of them would see you searching for a domain, and hold it, then try to make you buy it at a higher cost. I don't deal with domains any more, but I thought ICANN had put a stop to that practice.

I heard this rumor and to this day don't use purchase pages to search for domains; I query the whois database directly. If the TLD owner is in cahoots with scalpers, they'd see the search query come in no matter what I use, so that seems like the best option and it's super easy from a unix commandline as well (a whois tool is default installed or a click away in most distributions)

1. Super nitpick and personal pet peeve: "Buying" a domain is not buying it. You're absolutely renting it and it can be taken away at any time.

2. The post is a big list of "I made mistakes and had to face the consequences" — not one, but multiple. (Open repo, legalese comms to NC, non-actionable email to registrant) I've got a lot of sympathy, but I don't know if there's any learning besides "think -> do -> check -> repeat".

3. Congrats on the launch! For what it's worth, kill-saas.com looks more pleasing to my eyes than killsaas.com :)

Bonus Point 4.: I had a similar idea for a website with the same name a year or so ago when I was cancelling all my Netflix, Spotify, etc. subscriptions. There's evidence in my Whatsapp convos. Then again, I don't feel like you've stolen anything from me & wish you all the best! ;)

Domain hoarding is really annoying. Recently I noticed superposition.de was available and wanted to register it for a side business, now a domain grabber got it and is reselling it for 27.000 USD... I can't fathom how this is a legal practice. I mean, I get that it is legal but the naming authorities could change their terms of service to disallow such trading. It's a small annoyance of course but I find it tiring how every little aspect that made the Internet great is getting monetized into oblivion.

Honestly, there have been so many businesses and individuals that lose out on their domain because they just didn't buy it as soon as they saw it was available. I don't understand why - in the grand scheme of things a 5, 10 or even $100 domain isn't going to break the bank. Just buy the thing as soon as you find it and avoid this mess.

That was my strategy and I now own about a dozen domains for side projects that never got past the rough concept stage :)

>"I believe someone scraped this name and stole the domain."

I believe it is a bit harsh accusing someone of theft because he registered a domain before you did or doing some action before you did. Merely having an idea doesn't give you the right to a property before you pay for it.

Let's suppose I have found my dream home and I take my wife out for dinner and talk loud about why is that house wonderful, why does it have a huge potential and how I've talked the owner into making a nice discount. I brag loudly about how that house is almost a steal.

Because I have some things to do at work, I will be able to speak with the real estate agent in one or two weeks, only to find out it was sold to the gentleman sitting on the next table in the restaurant.

Should I go to the police and open a theft complain?

Of course, domain scrapping and squatting has some gray moral areas but are not against the law.

When I have an idea I like, I go register the domain first. Even if I will not pursue that idea further. At worst I will lose 5 to 10 dollars. At best I will make something out of it. Or I can even sell the domain along with my idea to someone else who might want to use it.

I don't search the domain names using registrars or various domain tools. I only use Whois services I trust and I usually buy the domain short time after that.

Your housing analogy is incomplete and inaccurate.

Imagine that I overhear you wanting that home but I front run you. Not because I also love that house, I just buy it because I heard you like it and so that you can't have it. I don't do anything with the house. I don't live in it. I don't consider the house to have any value other than you wanting it.

That's not the same thing as 2 home buyers appreciating hot property.

I do have an idea which might work against squatting. Write a script to flood domain registrar and online domain tools with searches and make the squatters pay for tens of thousands of useless domain names.

Cybersquatting is one prime example of value extraction vs value creation. HugeDomain has sat on my obscure family name's .com domain name and wants to sell it to me. Every year their price goes up a thousand dollars.

Hot take:

We should work towards dethroning .com as the default so that all the people who trade domain names lose all the money they had never earned. I'm also for a more expensive .com base price. Some of the things that make moving away from .com hard is the blanket gtld level email/traffic bans in Sophos and other security firms

> We should work towards dethroning .com as the default

Be the change you want to see. Why do you want the .com version of your family name?

.com has become the unofficial "primary" non-geo specific domain name tld, if you own the .com, you own the name effectively on the internet, everything else is usually seen as lower class.

I'm now desperately looking forward to reading someone else's blog post about their vibe domain squatting set up where a combination of LLMs and spiders trawling Github for fresh targets lead to a decent passive income.

This is like opening a restaurant and expecting to pay your lease on launch day

Pretty sure what happened is, he searched on Namecheap for the domain a few days before committing to buy. Namecheap and other scummy domain sellers are known to buy domains that their users show interest in by searching. The telltale sign was that the registrar is also Namecheap.

Never use GoDaddy or Namecheap or other scummy providers to check domain availability. Always use the ICANN whois service.

I do not understand why you feel entitled to the domain. If I was entitled to the domain of every side project I had, I would be a multimillionaire in domain assets.

> After some back and forth, I realized my GitHub repository was public, which was not my intention at all before launching the project.

:facepalm:

Uhhh, welcome to the internet?

> I realized my GitHub repository was public, which was not my intention at all before launching the project.

I'm sorry, but aren't GitHub repos private by default?

edit: see down-thread, but they are private by default in GitHub Desktop, which is what I have used to create new repos for years. However, they are public by default on github.com.

Personal repositories are public by default, and for organizations you can change the default visibility (default one might be private, not sure about that).

Oh wow, I just tested this and found the source of my confusion.

I'm know it's not cool, but I have used GitHub Desktop all the time, for years. In the GitHub Desktop app, my new personal repos are private by default.

However, on the github.com, they are public by default.

That seems a bit weird, and a dangerous place for inconsistency. I certainly prefer the private by default behavior. I would love to know the PM lore about this difference.

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