I spent 45 minutes typing names into Namecheap so you don't have to

#ai #sideprojects #productivity #startup

I spent 45 minutes typing names into Namecheap so you don't have to

You know the loop.

You have an idea. You open Namelix, type three words, get a list of names. Half of them look like CVS pharmacy brands. You pick the three you actually like, switch to Namecheap, and start typing.

Taken. Taken. Taken. Taken. Taken.

Pivot to .io. Taken. Taken. Pivot to .ai. Taken at $4,500 / year.

Forty-five minutes later you've registered something with two extra syllables and a number in it, and you tell yourself it's fine.

That's the loop I built NameBuddy.ai to break.

The bug in every other AI naming tool

Every AI domain generator I tried has the same architecture:

LLM generates 30 names from your prompt
Tool shows you all 30
You click each one to check availability — usually via the registrar's affiliate link, because that's how they get paid

The first two steps are easy. The third one is where 90% of those names die. The "creative .com" the AI just invented? Some domain investor squatted it in 2014.

So you're spending your evening clicking through names that were never going to work.

The fix is unglamorous

NameBuddy.ai does one extra step before showing you anything:

For every name the LLM generates, we hit the registry's RDAP endpoint directly. Not the registrar's search box. Not a sales feed. The authoritative registry record that says whether the domain exists.

If it's taken, we don't show it. Full stop.

The result is what looks like a shorter list — because it IS shorter — but every single name on it is registrable right now, at the registrar of your choice, at the published price.

The trick is making this fast enough that it feels like normal generation. We stream the verified names as they come back, so you start seeing options in ~2 seconds even though we're checking dozens in parallel.

Why it's free, and why it's going to stay free

Here's the part that always gets a raised eyebrow:

We don't take affiliate cash from registrars.

Most "free" naming tools earn $5-15 every time you click through to register at GoDaddy or whoever. That sounds harmless until you realize it shapes the entire product:

They'd rather show you names available at expensive registrars
They'd rather suggest .ai (the registrar margins are fatter) than .com
They'd rather you register today than think tomorrow

We earn nothing from your pick. Register at Cloudflare for $9. Register at Porkbun. Don't register at all and come back next month. We don't care. We don't even know.

That's not generosity — it's the only way I could think of to make a tool I'd actually trust if someone else built it.

What's in v1

AI-generated names from a one-line project description
Real-time RDAP verification — never shows taken names
Five TLDs simultaneously: .ai .com .io .app .net
Live-streamed results — verified names appear as they're found
Sign in with Google → every search saves to your history with shareable links

What's not in v1:

Logo generation (you don't need a logo to test a name)
Trademark check (you should still check USPTO yourself before betting on it)
Bulk export (coming if anyone asks)

A naming heuristic I keep coming back to

The best startup names I've seen are usually one of two things:

An invented word that sounds like English — Spotify, Zalando, Twilio
A real word slightly out of context — Apple, Stripe, Patreon

The ones that fail are the literal compounds: "AppGenie", "BrandifyAI", "FlexHubPro." If you can write your tagline by removing two syllables from the name, the name is doing the tagline's job badly.

NameBuddy.ai biases toward the first two — partly because I think they're better, partly because they're the names everyone else's generator can't find since they're invented.