Affix Domains

affix-domains

Affix a seed word with common brand prefixes and suffixes, check each candidate live against the authoritative registry, and prompt the user to register the free ones.

Steps

1. Gate on the bare seed's .com. Before generating anything, check <seed>.com alone. It decides the scope of everything below:

   • Free → the seed itself is winnable. Say so up front, then run the affix sweep on .com only — the original contract. Nothing else is needed.
   • Taken → escalate. Every check from here on runs across the full TLD set: .com .net .org .ai .io .co .app .cc. Also sweep the bare seed across the other seven — mate.ai is worth more than matebuddy.com, and it costs eight lookups to find out.

2. Generate candidates. For seed W, produce W + each suffix and each prefix + W from the catalog below. Lowercase. Dedupe. Always drop triple-letter runs (mateee) and a suffix that repeats the seed (matemate).

   The English-word filter is mode-dependent: in .com-only mode, drop any combination that spells an existing English word (e.g. getup, openbox) — its .com is almost certainly taken and burns a lookup. In escalated mode, keep them — that rationale is .com-specific, and a real word gone in .com says nothing about .ai or .cc. (mately is a dictionary adverb and the flagship -ly SaaS pattern; it is free in six TLDs.) If the user hints a style (playful, techy, marketplace…), weight the matching categories; default is every category.

3. Check availability with the bundled script, which already encodes the per-TLD endpoint, parallelism, and retry rules. It lives in this skill's scripts/ dir — invoke it by absolute path:

   ~/.claude/skills/affix-domains/scripts/check_domains.sh \
     --tlds com,net,org,ai,io,co,app,cc  cand1 cand2 cand3 ...
   

   With many candidates, pass them on stdin instead: printf '%s\n' "${cands[@]}" | … --stdin.

   Pass bare names, not domains — the script forms name.tld itself. Output is one <domain>\tFREE|TAKEN|UNKNOWN line per lookup. A full 68-affix escalated sweep is ~550 lookups and takes roughly 30–60s, paced by the serial .app path.

   UNKNOWN is not FREE. It means the registry never gave a clean answer. Never show it as available; re-run those few names, and if they stay UNKNOWN, say so explicitly.

4. Surface the survivors. In .com-only mode, list one line per free .com, in catalog rank order (note each name's category).

   In escalated mode the raw cross-product is far too long to dump. Instead, order surviving names by their affix's catalog rank, breaking ties by best available TLD in this preference order:

   .com > .ai > .io > .co > .net > .org > .app > .cc

   Show the best one or two TLDs per name, and offer the complete matrix only if the user asks. Note when a name is free across many TLDs — that usually means it is genuinely unclaimed rather than merely available in the leftovers.

5. Prompt the user to register. Ask which they want to take. Point them to Cloudflare Registrar (or their preferred one) — note that Cloudflare Registrar does not sell every TLD in this set, so a second registrar may be needed. Do not enter payment on their behalf — registration is the user's action.

TLD endpoints

Verified 2026-08-27, each against a known-taken and a known-free control. The script holds these; the table is here so a human can audit it.

.app rate limiting is a rolling quota, not a concurrency cap. Dropping to -P 2 does not help — once the budget is spent, every request 429s regardless of parallelism. The only fix is serial requests plus backoff-and-retry, which is what the script does. Treat 429 as retry, never as an answer.

Endpoints that look right and are wrong

Both of these return HTTP 404 for domains that are definitely registered — a silent false-available that would tell the user to go buy a taken domain. Do not substitute them:

• rdap.godaddy.com/v1/domain/ — 404s on t.co. It is the registrar's RDAP, not the registry's.
• rdap.org/domain/ — a bootstrap proxy; 404s on both .co and .io because neither is in the IANA bootstrap file.

Catalog ranking

Both catalogs are ranked by evidence: how often the hottest AI startups actually use each affix in their brand names — a 433-company corpus (Forbes AI 50 2026+2025, CB Insights AI 100 2026, YC, a16z Top-100 consumer apps, LinkedIn Top Startups US, 2025–26 mega-rounds, AI dev-tools peer group; snapshot 2026-08-28) — blended with fusability and meaning (Score = 2·E + F + M). Generate candidates from every row, but check and surface them in rank order. The full evidence tables (scores, old-vs-new ranks, corpus examples) are in references/ranking-2026-08.md. Known catalog gap, deliberately not auto-added: the era's dominant suffix is a trailing "AI" word (~60 hot companies), plus -lab, -0, -gpt, applied- — see the reference before extending the catalog.

Prefix catalog — ranked

Suffix catalog — ranked

Rules

• Live lookups only — never claim availability from cached knowledge or prior turns of this conversation. Domains get registered between checks.
• Only an explicit negative means available. RDAP 404, or WHOIS DOMAIN NOT FOUND. Anything else — 429, 5xx, a timeout, an empty body — is UNKNOWN, which is reported as unknown and never as free.
• Use the bundled script rather than hand-rolled curl. The per-TLD hosts, the .co WHOIS special case, and the .app retry loop are all easy to get wrong in a way that fails silently toward false-available.
• The escalated TLD set is fixed: .com .net .org .ai .io .co .app .cc. If the user wants a TLD outside it, check it explicitly and say the endpoint was not pre-verified.
• No payment on the user's behalf. Prompt them to register; they check out.