Why I Let a Slot Machine Set the Price of My Domains
Anyone who has ever tried to buy or sell a domain name knows the strangest part of the whole business: nobody can tell you what a domain is actually worth.
The pricing problem nobody admits
Ask three brokers to value the same domain and you will get three very different answers — often wildly different. One says four figures, another says six, a third declines to guess at all. There are rules of thumb, of course: length, extension, search demand, brandability. But when it comes to the final number, domain pricing is far less a science than the industry likes to pretend. Much of it is instinct, mood, and the eternal question of what someone, somewhere, might one day be willing to pay.
For a seller, this is frustrating. For a buyer, it is worse. You never quite know whether the price you are quoted is fair, inflated, or plucked from thin air. The whole exchange runs on a quiet fiction: that there is a "right" price, and that the person quoting it knows what it is.
So I stopped pretending
Rather than dress up guesswork as expertise, I decided to make the uncertainty visible — and turn it into something people actually enjoy.
On my domains, there is no drawn-out negotiation and no broker theatre. There is a counter. It runs through numbers at speed, you press stop, and wherever it lands is your price. If you don't like it, you press start again. And again. As often as you like, until a number appears that you are happy to pay.
It is, quite deliberately, a game of chance — because that is what domain pricing quietly always was.
I simply removed the pretence and put the randomness where everyone can see it.
How it works
The mechanism is simple. You play until you find a number you like. You take a screenshot of it. You send it to me. That number becomes your offer. I confirm it, you transfer payment, and I hand over the domain and its transfer code. No haggling, no waiting weeks for a broker to respond, no opaque valuations.
There is one honest caveat, and I state it plainly on every page: the number is an offer, confirmed by me before payment, and a domain goes to the first completed purchase. Playing is free, and it commits you to nothing.
Why this is fairer, not less serious
Some will say a serious asset deserves a serious price tag. I would argue the opposite. A fixed "serious" price is often just one person's guess presented as fact. My approach is more honest: it admits that the number is, to a large degree, arbitrary — and it lets the buyer take part in landing on one they can live with. The floor is protected on my side, so no domain ever sells below what I am willing to accept. Within that, chance does the rest.
Domain trading was always a gamble. I just made it an actual game — faster, more transparent, and considerably more fun than the alternative.
Try it on any of my domains, listed at dudler.swiss.