There's a name I renewed five years in a row before I admitted it was a bad buy. Actually more than one.
That's the thing about renewal season. It tells the truth whether you're ready for it or not.
A portfolio looks great when you're buying one name at a time. Ten bucks here, twelve there, a closeout you couldn't pass up, a hand reg you grabbed because a trend looked like it was heating up. Each decision is small. Then the renewal bill shows up and all those small decisions arrive as one big number, and you're sitting there doing math you'd rather not do.
Access to domains BEFORE they drop — all at a flat $99. No auctions, no negotiations.
Buying domains is easy. Renewing them is where the discipline actually lives, and most of us aren't as disciplined as we would like to be.
I want to be clear that I'm not against holding names. Some names need time. A few of my better sales would never have happened if I'd judged them too fast and dropped them in year two. But there's a difference between being patient with a quality name and just renewing something because dropping it would mean admitting you were wrong. I've done both. I can usually tell which one I'm doing if I'm honest for ten minutes.
So before you renew, give it ten minutes. Not a weekend. Not a 20-column spreadsheet. Just a quick, honest pass through what's coming due, sorting names into four piles: keep and renew, keep but reprice, list before it expires, or drop and move on.
Here's how I run that pass.
Would I buy this today? Not "did it make sense when I bought it." Today. If you saw this exact name in someone else's account right now, would you pull out a card for it? That question cuts through a lot of feelings, because we all own names that made sense in the moment. The extension was hot. A comp sold. It rounded out a niche you were building. Fine. But if you wouldn't buy it today, what exactly are you paying to keep?
Who's the actual buyer? Not "a startup might want it." That's the answer you give yourself when you don't have one. I mean specifically, who uses this name, what do they sell, does owning it make them look more legit than the alternative. A name can be clever and read great in your account and still have nobody on the other end of it. That's the gap that gets expensive.
Has it shown any signs of life? Inquiries, real landing page traffic, an offer, somebody following up. No activity doesn't automatically condemn a name. Good ones sit quiet for years. But quiet plus no obvious buyer plus no real reason to think demand is coming is three strikes, and you should at least say that out loud to yourself.
Is it the name, or is it the price? Sometimes the name is fine and the number is the problem. If something's been sitting at $4,995 for three years without so much as an inquiry, the answer might not be "drop it." It might be a much lower number, or a liquidation channel, before you re-up for another year at a price the market already ignored.
Is the trend still buying? We've all watched this. Crypto, NFT, metaverse, AI, agentic, whatever's next. A few of those names became real assets. Most just felt good while the market was loud. Renewal time is when you find out which one you're holding.
Would I rather have the name or the cash? This one rewires how renewals feel. Twelve dollars is nothing. But a stack of weak twelves adds up to real money fast, faster if you're holding pricier extensions, and that money isn't just savings. It could renew your best names, or sit ready for the next closeout or auction or private deal that actually matters.
Did I ever really give it a fair shot? Does it resolve. Clean landing page. Visible price. Listed somewhere buyers actually look. Easy checkout. Sometimes the name didn't fail. The setup around it did, and that's on us, not the domain.
After all that, some names still won't pass the test. That doesn't mean they're worthless. It might just mean they're not worth another year to you.
And that's a different thing than worthless. Another investor might see an angle you missed. A developer might need something quick for a project. A founder might want something cheap to test an idea. The name you're done with at renewal could be worth ninety-nine bucks to somebody who's never seen it.
That's the whole reason NotRenewing.com exists. If a name's already on its way out, you can list it before it drops and give it one last look from people who'd never have found it otherwise. I'm not going to pretend every expiring name is a hidden gem. Plenty of them should drop, and they will. But there's a real difference between a name expiring because nobody wanted it and a name expiring because nobody ever saw it.
So before you click renew all, take the ten minutes. Pull the list, run the questions, sort the piles, act before the registrar acts for you.
A stronger portfolio isn't always a bigger one. Some years it's a smaller one with better names and a renewal bill that doesn't make you wince. Other years I tell myself all of this and renew the junk anyway, so maybe ask someone with more discipline than me.