Can we agree that 'domain availability' APIs are garbage?

62 days and this still burns.

.io and .ai are the worst offenders for me. Registry direct checks via EPP where possible, but not every registrar exposes true premium status in their tiered responses. Some return "available" with a premium flag in a secondary field that half the parsers ignore.

Five APIs, still no single source of truth. Aggregate or die is right, but even aggregation fails when the underlying registries don't publish reserved/premium lists in real time.

Anyone actually solved this with Leaseweb or RackNerd tooling? Their docs mention registry-grade polling but I've never trusted the marketing copy.

Sorry, that should have read "200 domain portfolio" — autocorrect on mobile. Mainly .io and .tech, but the issue hit me on a .dev last month too.

What does your aggregation stack look like? I was running OVHcloud plus a direct Gandi feed but the Gandi side kept timing out. Curious if anyone's got a reliable secondary that actually covers premium tiers without the $$$$ enterprise contract.

Also @admin — any update on that project your regular was building? 81 days is a long tease.

Did anyone here end up testing that thing admin mentioned? 109 days and still no aggregate tool that actually checks premium tiers

I have been burned by Vultr's drop list twice now, same pattern as brusselsdzire1 — "available" until you hit the registry cart

Registry direct is the only way I trust now but good luck automating that across 400 tlds

126 days and nobody answered the actual question.

.io and .ai are the worst offenders for this. Registry direct checks through Vultr's EPP gateway still miss premium holds that only show in the purchase phase.

I have seen the same domain flip from "available" to "$8,400 premium" between the check and the create command. The timing window is sometimes under a second if someone else hit the API in between.

Aggregate or die is right but nobody aggregates the premium tier tables because registries treat them as proprietary. Contabo has a beta that tries, still waiting on access.

211 days and this still burns.

.io and .ai are the worst offenders for me. Registry direct is a fantasy unless you're moving serious volume. Most of us are stuck with middlemen.

I ended up wiring five APIs into a janky aggregator. Still misses edge cases. Still costs more than the domains some months.

Has anyone actually tried KnownHost's new registry-link tier? Rumor is they bypass the drop-list cache entirely.