Anguilla's country-code ending, now read as a category marker by buyers of AI products.
Below: what .ai costs against the other 13 endings we check, who it suits and who it does not, and exactly how a lookup answers “is this name free” — including what the answer is when the lookup itself fails.
Indicative first-year prices, from the same table the live check prices its tiles from.
Across the 14 endings the check queries, the range runs from .xyz at ₹249 to .ai at ₹15,400; holding all 14 for one year would cost ₹40,038.
₹15,400 — one .ai for a year — also covers .xyz, .co.in, .in, .com, .org, .net, .dev, .app, .shop and .co together, ₹11,840 for 10 endings, with ₹3,560 left over.
These are indicative rupee prices carried in our own table so endings can be compared against each other. They are not a registrar quote. They are also first-year prices: most registrars discount the first year and charge more at renewal, and a domain is a rental you pay every year for as long as the brand exists.
And who it does not. The judgement is ours; the prices above are not.
The price is the demand. This ending costs what it costs because a category wants it, and the price block on this page sets out exactly what the same money would buy across the endings your customers already recognise.
An ending cannot make a product an AI product. It can only make the claim — and the buyers who care about the claim are precisely the ones who will check it in the first demo. Registered for the right reason it is a piece of positioning; registered for the wrong one it is an annual bill for a label.
Endings a customer will type instead of .ai: .io at ₹3,800, .com at ₹999. Whoever owns those collects the traffic and the mistyped email you paid to earn, so price them before you decide, not after.
RDAP — the protocol that replaced WHOIS — and what we report when it does not answer.
WHOIS was a text service: every registry formatted its reply differently, and telling “no such domain” apart from “the registry is having a bad afternoon” meant parsing English. RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, is the JSON replacement the industry has moved to. It runs over ordinary HTTPS and answers with ordinary HTTP status codes, which is what makes an automated check trustworthy: a 404 is a defined answer rather than a sentence somebody has to interpret.
A check for a .ai name is one request to https://rdap.org/domain/yourname.ai. rdap.org is a bootstrap service: it looks up which registry runs the ending and redirects the query to that registry's own RDAP server, and the status code that comes back is the registry's own. When the domain exists, the JSON that comes back carries the registration events — including the expiry date, where the registry publishes one. Some registries publish it and some do not, so we print it when it is there and leave the field out when it is not, rather than filling it with an estimate.
All 14 endings are queried in parallel, so checking a name costs one wait rather than 14. Answers are cached for five minutes and the outbound requests are rate-limited on our side — a bucket of sixty, refilling ten a second — because rdap.org is a free public service and staying a polite client of it is what keeps the check working.
| What the lookup returns | What it means | What we report |
|---|---|---|
| 404 | The registry holds no registration record for the name | Free, with the first-year price beside it |
| 200 | The name is registered; the JSON carries its registration events | Taken, with the expiry date when the registry publishes one |
| Any other status | A reply we cannot read as an answer | Taken — we would rather be cautious than call something free on a response we did not understand |
| Timeout or network error | No reply within five seconds | “Could not be checked just now.” Never free |
The rule behind the last two rows is worth stating plainly: “available” is the answer somebody spends money on, so it only ever comes from a real reply. A failed lookup is reported as a failed lookup.
The label is built the same way the live check builds it: lowercased, with everything that is not a letter or a digit removed — so “Chai & Co” is queried as chaico.
| Published name | The address that would be queried | Characters |
|---|---|---|
| Anil | anil.ai | 7 |
| Anju | anju.ai | 7 |
| Annu | annu.ai | 7 |
| Ansh | ansh.ai | 7 |
| Anuj | anuj.ai | 7 |
| Anvi | anvi.ai | 7 |
| Arif | arif.ai | 7 |
| Arti | arti.ai | 7 |
These are strings, not answers. We are showing you exactly what a check would send to the registry for .ai; whether any of them is free today is a question only a live lookup can answer. Names drawn from our published corpus, shortest labels first.
Every ending the check queries, cheapest first. The same table appears on each of these pages, so whichever one you landed on carries the whole picture.
| Ending | First year | What it signals |
|---|---|---|
| .xyz | ₹249 | Cheap and unrestricted |
| .co.in | ₹599 | India, one level down |
| .in | ₹699 | India-first |
| .com | ₹999 | The global default |
| .org | ₹999 | Non-profit, by convention |
| .net | ₹1,099 | Reads as a second choice |
| .dev | ₹1,199 | Engineering-facing, HTTPS only |
| .app | ₹1,499 | Promises a download |
| .shop | ₹1,999 | Retail, cheaper |
| .co | ₹2,499 | Short, and mistaken for .com |
| .io | ₹3,800 | Developer tools |
| .tech | ₹3,999 | Hardware, IT services |
| .store | ₹4,999 | Retail, stated twice |
| .ai | ₹15,400 | AI, and priced like it |
Prices are indicative and first-year. Renewal rates are set by the registrar, not by us, and are usually higher than the first year — check the renewal price on the registrar's own page before you commit a brand to an ending.
A domain is the fastest check and the weakest claim. Three registers can each stop a name that every registrar would happily sell you.
The company register. A company name is approved by the MCA through its own name-reservation step, and the registrar can refuse a name that sits too close to a company already on the register. That decision is made on the register, not on the internet: a free .ai tells you nothing about it, and a name you have already printed is an expensive thing to lose at incorporation.
Trademark classes. A trademark is registered per class — 45 of them, goods in 1 to 34 and services in 35 to 45 — and a mark registered in your class can stop you using a name even when every ending in the table above is free. The reverse holds too: a mark in a class unrelated to yours usually cannot. Registering a domain creates no trademark right whatsoever, and taking one that matches somebody else's registered mark is a way to lose the domain rather than a way to keep the name. Start with the 45 classes and what falls in each.
Handles and listings. Social handles are first-come and entirely unrelated to the domain registry — Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook each have their own queue, and so do the App Store, Play, GitHub, Shopify and Amazon India. A name is only usefully yours when the address, the handles and the register agree, which is why the check runs them together rather than one at a time.
Query RDAP, not your browser. RDAP is the Registration Data Access Protocol, the JSON service that has replaced WHOIS: a request to https://rdap.org/domain/yourname.ai returns 404 when the registry holds no registration record, which means the name is free, and 200 with the registration data as JSON when it is taken. Typing the address into a browser proves nothing — a registered domain with no website loads nothing at all, which looks identical to a name nobody owns. Naam Dekho runs the RDAP lookup for .ai and the other 13 endings in one pass when you check a name.
₹15,400 for the first year on the indicative table this page is built from, making it the dearest of 14. That is ₹14,401 more than .com. First-year prices are the discounted ones at most registrars and renewals are usually dearer, so use these to compare endings against each other and take the registrar's checkout page as the number you actually pay.
It suits: A company whose product genuinely is an AI product, selling to buyers who read the ending as a category; A funded B2B business for which the annual registration is a rounding error. It does not suit: A pre-revenue founder registering it to look like an AI company — it is by a wide margin the dearest ending we check; Anyone selling to Indian consumers, who will hear the ending as two letters and ask you to repeat them.
It is worth it when the ending saves you a sentence with a buyer who already reads it as a category, and it renews every year, so the question is not whether you can afford it once. Set it against the arithmetic in the price block on this page: the same money holds most of the table for a year, including the endings the rest of your customers will actually type.
No, and no static page can. This file was built ahead of time and serves the same bytes to everyone; registrations and expiries happen by the minute, so any specific answer printed here would be stale before it was read. The lookup runs live in the product — type a name and every ending is queried at that moment.
All 14 endings are queried live over RDAP in one pass, alongside the social handles and the marketplace listings — with the price beside every ending that comes back free.
Check a nameCheapest first. Each page carries this same price table and the same explanation of the check.
Before you register