Originally intended for network operators; today read by most people as evidence that the .com was taken.
Below: what .net 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.
₹1,099 — one .net for a year — also covers .xyz and .co.in together, ₹848 for 2 endings, with ₹251 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 original meaning of .net has almost worn off, and what replaced it is an inference: a visitor who sees .net assumes there is a .com and that it is not yours. For a consumer brand that inference is a small tax on every impression.
For a company that actually operates a network, the word does its old job perfectly well, and the association is a description rather than an apology. That is the test — if removing the ending from your sentence changes what your business does, .net is honest; if not, it is a substitute and it will read like one.
Endings a customer will type instead of .net: .com at ₹999, .org 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 .net name is one request to https://rdap.org/domain/yourname.net. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Ajit | ajit.net | 8 |
| Alka | alka.net | 8 |
| Aman | aman.net | 8 |
| Amar | amar.net | 8 |
| Amir | amir.net | 8 |
| Amit | amit.net | 8 |
| Anil | anil.net | 8 |
| Anju | anju.net | 8 |
These are strings, not answers. We are showing you exactly what a check would send to the registry for .net; 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 .net 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.net 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 .net and the other 13 endings in one pass when you check a name.
₹1,099 for the first year on the indicative table this page is built from, making it the 6th cheapest of 14. That is ₹100 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: ISPs, hosting companies and connectivity businesses where the word is literal; Infrastructure and network-operations products whose buyers are engineers. It does not suit: Consumer brands — the reader's first thought is that somebody else has your .com; Anyone choosing it to save money; it is priced above the .com it would be standing in for.
It is the most confusable substitute, which is the problem. Endings that look like near-misses of .com — .net, .co — inherit the confusion along with the traffic; an ending that is plainly different, like .in for an Indian business, sets its own expectation instead of inviting a comparison you lose.
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