There is no pile of leftover $0 .coms
People say “scrape $0 domains” and picture a list of abandoned .com names sitting on a sidewalk. That list is not public, and it is not free.
What happens when a .com dies
It goes into a deletion cycle. Drop-catch services and auctions fight over anything with traffic or a dictionary word. The winner pays. A random leftover still costs the normal registry fee at a registrar — usually around ten dollars a year, not zero.
Scraping WHOIS or registrar search boxes to “gather” those names does not make them free. It just gets you a list of things you still have to buy. This site will not do that.
Freenom is not coming back as free
For years Freenom gave out .tk, .cf, .gq, .ga, and .ml at no charge. That factory became a phishing sewer. Meta sued. The free service died in 2024. In 2026 Freenom is selling some of those extensions again — as paid names, starting around €8 a year. That is not a $0 scrape target.
TLD-List’s June 2026 free-domain guide is blunt: the era of perpetually free country-code extensions is over. Treat any “forever free TLD” ad as a thing to verify, then usually to ignore.
The other fake $0
Hostinger, Bluehost, Wix, IONOS and the rest will give you a domain with an annual plan. Year one is bundled. Year two is a bill. Cancel hosting and you can often transfer the name out — you still pay the next registrar. That is a discount, not a free domain.
What is actually $0
- Platform subdomains you do not own:
github.io,netlify.app. - Third-level / community names you do control the DNS on: eu.org, is-a.dev, js.org (JS projects only), FreeDNS shared domains.
That second list is what this site gathers. Use the cheap-TLD hunter if you just want to see a slug against those programs. For a named dead company, use the graveyard lookup instead of hoping the .com dropped.