DEV Community: Johnny Picante

5 side projects that would absolutely nail it on .Vegas

Johnny Picante — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:45:02 +0000

Most indie hackers I know spend an embarrassing amount of time on the naming part. We argue with ourselves over the perfect .com, eventually settle for some janky combo of words with random consonants ripped out, and ship a domain we secretly don't love.

There's a quieter option a lot of builders haven't seriously considered: .Vegas. It's a geographic TLD, but it does NOT require you to be in Las Vegas or build anything Vegas-related. What it does give you is a TLD that sounds bigger than it costs, reads as memorable, and is still wide open in 2026.

I went down a small rabbit hole this week looking at side-project ideas that would have an almost unfair head start on .Vegas. Here are five.

1. A weekend trip planner

Domain: weekend.vegas or trip.vegas

This is the lowest-hanging fruit and I'm honestly surprised nobody's built it yet. A tiny webapp that takes a Friday-to-Sunday window and spits back a fully booked itinerary: flight, hotel, two restaurant reservations, one show, one activity. Three clicks, done.

Why it works on .Vegas: the domain is the elevator pitch. Nobody needs to read your tagline. The URL bar tells you what the product does. That's worth more than most landing-page copy will ever earn.

2. A bachelor/bachelorette party coordinator

Domain: bach.vegas, party.vegas, last.vegas

Group-trip coordination is genuinely awful. Splitwise + a group chat + a shared Notion doc + that one friend who keeps forgetting to Venmo back. There's room for a niche product here that handles the deposit splits, the "who's in for the cabana" upsells, and the inevitable last-minute flight changes.

Why it works on .Vegas: the URL doubles as a tagline. You don't have to explain what kind of trip it's for.

3. A booking aggregator for shows and residencies

Domain: shows.vegas, tonight.vegas

Caesars, MGM, Live Nation, AXS, Vivid Seats, the venue's own ticketing system — finding a good show on a specific Tuesday night is a pain. A scraper-backed booking aggregator that's honest about its affiliate links could carve out a real niche.

Why it works on .Vegas: SEO. Geo-TLDs are a small but real signal for "this site is about Las Vegas," and you're going to be competing for keywords like "vegas shows tonight" anyway. Why fight it?

4. A local-business directory done right

Domain: eats.vegas, coffee.vegas, food.vegas

Yelp is bad and Google Maps is fine but generic. There's actual room for a curated, opinionated local directory in a high-tourism city — the kind of thing that includes one good sentence about each place instead of seventy reviews that contradict each other.

Why it works on .Vegas: a curated directory is exactly the kind of thing that benefits from a strong identity. eats.vegas immediately signals "small, local, opinionated." eats-vegas-guide.com signals "SEO farm, exit quickly."

5. A poker / blackjack / sports-betting tracker

Domain: track.vegas, bankroll.vegas, vig.vegas

I'd build this myself if I weren't already drowning in side projects. A clean web/mobile app that logs sessions, calculates bankroll variance, and gives honest reports on whether you're actually winning over time. The existing apps are dated and feature-bloated.

Why it works on .Vegas: trust signaling. A finance-adjacent product feels more credible on a geo-TLD than on bankrolltracker-app.io.

The honest part

None of these will succeed because of the domain. They'll succeed or fail on whether the product is good, whether you ship it, and whether you can find your first hundred users.

But the domain is a small accelerant. Memorable URLs get shared more in DMs. They get pronounced correctly on podcasts. They feel like a real company. And right now, in 2026, the best ones across .Vegas are still sitting on the shelf for ~$15.

If you're naming a side project this weekend and you haven't checked it as an option, take ten minutes and look. You might find something you like more than the weird .com variant you were settling for.

Have you built anything on a geo-TLD? I'd be curious how the conversions compare to a .com — drop a note in the comments.

The Case for .Vegas as Your Next Project Domain

Johnny Picante — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:19:15 +0000

Every developer I know has had the same moment. You finally come up with a project name you actually like. You type it into a registrar. It's taken. You add "app" to the end. Also taken. You try "get" in front. Parked since 2013. You settle on a five-word hyphenated compound that no human will ever type correctly, and you ship anyway.

I want to make a small argument for doing something different: consider a .vegas domain.

I know, I know. Bear with me for 700 words.

The TL;DR

.vegas is a geographic top-level domain, not a gimmick TLD. It was delegated in 2014 and is operated by the City of Las Vegas.
Premium one-word names are still largely available. Two-word names are almost entirely open.
Prices are comparable to .com — typically around $15-$40/year at most registrars.
You do not need to live in or be associated with Las Vegas to register one.
It's memorable in a way generic TLDs are not.

If that's enough to make you go check availability, great. If not, here's the longer case.

The "just ship" argument

Naming paralysis is the silent killer of side projects. I've watched more than one developer friend spend three weekends on branding and zero weekends on code. A lot of that paralysis comes from bouncing off unavailable .coms.

The value of moving to a different TLD isn't that it's better than .com in the abstract. It's that it restores the space of good names. The name you actually wanted — the short, clean, one-word version — is probably available on .vegas right now. You can register it today and get back to building.

The "memorable" argument

Generic TLDs (.io, .dev, .app) solve the availability problem but they don't really say anything. .vegas says something. Even if your project has nothing to do with gambling, entertainment, or the Strip, the word itself carries associations: bold, confident, larger-than-life, a little unserious in a way that can be charming.

That flavor is free branding. payments.vegas sounds like a product. stream.vegas sounds like a product. notes.vegas sounds like a product you'd want to at least click on.

Compare that to notes-app-v2.io.

"But what about SEO / email / trust?"

A few practical notes, because developers always want them:

SEO. Google has repeatedly said that new TLDs are treated the same as legacy TLDs for ranking. Geographic TLDs can carry a soft local signal but otherwise behave like any other domain. Your content and backlinks matter far more than your suffix.

Email deliverability. Modern mail providers (Gmail, Fastmail, Proton, etc.) handle new TLDs fine. Where you'll occasionally see trouble is enterprise spam filters that haven't updated their allowlists in a decade. If your audience is large enterprises with aggressive filters, test before committing.

User trust. This one is real but overstated. Users have been trained on .com, yes, but they've also seen .io, .ai, .dev, .xyz, .co become normal. A clean, short .vegas name in an address bar doesn't look suspicious — it looks distinctive.

Who this isn't for

A few honest caveats:

If your project is a direct-to-consumer app that needs to look as trustworthy as a bank to a 65-year-old, stick with .com.
If you plan to run a serious email newsletter to enterprise buyers, check with your ESP first.
If you've already got traction on another domain, don't move for aesthetic reasons.

Who it is for

Indie hackers launching something this weekend and tired of domain-squatter prices.
Developers naming an internal tool, CLI, API, or documentation site.
Anyone who actually has a Vegas connection and wants to lean into it.
Anyone who wants a name that sounds like a product, not a Kubernetes cluster.

A concrete exercise

Open a new tab. Think of the one-word name you actually wanted for your current project — the one that was taken. Go check it on .vegas. I'd be surprised if it isn't available.

That's really the whole argument. The best names you've been priced out of on the legacy TLDs are sitting on the shelf, at sticker price, on a TLD that makes your project sound a little cooler than it probably is.

You don't need to love Las Vegas to see the value. You just need to have spent one too many hours in a registrar search box.

Ship the thing.

If you've got a .vegas domain running in production, I'd love to hear what you're building in the comments.