The highest we've paid for a .com domain name is $1.5K. We also ended up buying the same .co domain.

In another case, we opted for the .co, since the .com owner wanted $16K. Using a .co is a good alternative, since Google treats it as a generic ccTLD [1].

I am curious, what do people here think about .co domains?

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en