Renewal vs. drop · by the numbers
Should you renew that domain? Run the numbers.
Renewal is the one domain decision you make every year, and the only one most tools answer with a feeling. This runs the arithmetic: your renewal price against the appraised range and the market’s measured sale odds — expected value of holding, the break-even odds your fee implies, and what you’d expect to spend before a sale arrives. A position, not a keep/drop command: the belief is yours, this prices it.
This renewal breaks even at sale odds inside the market's typical 1–2% band — the arithmetic neither clearly pays for the year nor clearly doesn't. This is the judgment zone, and we label it as one: the decision turns on whether this specific name's odds beat the portfolio average, which no model can measure.
A POSITION, NOT A COMMAND ── The 1–2% is a portfolio average across investor-grade names; your name’s real odds may sit far from it, and the break-even line above tells you exactly what you’d have to believe. What the arithmetic can’t weigh: a project of your own, a buyer you can picture, personal value. We compute; you decide.
NameBio Dictionary / English Word .com, past 3 years, n=1,163; p25–p75 of reported sales
direction (shorter = more valuable) per GoDaddy's published valuation research; step sizes are a judgment call — NameBio's free tier gates length filters
rank 6,392 in the Norvig corpus — the band is data; the multiplier magnitude is a judgment call in v1 (frequency ≠ commercial intent)
baseline — every anchor cell is measured on .com
NOTE ── A price is conditional on finding the buyer. Typical investor portfolios sell 1–2% of names per year; an unsold appraisal is worth $0 that year. Not a trademark check. A domain containing someone else's mark can be worth less than zero (UDRP risk).
Informational only, not professional advice. Expected value over a portfolio-average sell-through is context for a decision, not the decision — and we can’t see the one thing that most moves real outcomes: the specific buyer. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type is sent or stored.
How the calculation works
Anchors retrieved July 2026 · Last reviewed: July 2026
Where the numbers come from
The appraised range is the output of our appraisal engine — the same deterministic, in-browser model behind the homepage tool, with its full methodology published there: the wholesale range is the interquartile spread of NameBio-reported sales in the domain’s pattern class, adjusted by named factors tagged as data or judgment. The yearly sale odds are the market’s measured portfolio sell-through of 1–2% (NamePros, Namecheap) — the same registered fact our bulk appraisal uses. The renewal price is your input, because prices vary by TLD, registrar, and premium status — read it off your renewal invoice; we’d rather ask than bake in a constant that goes stale.
The three lines, exactly as computed
For a renewal price R, wholesale range W = [lo, hi], and sell-through band p = [1%, 2%]:
EXPECTED VALUE / YEAR = p.lo × W.lo − R … p.hi × W.hi − R
BREAK-EVEN ODDS = R ÷ W.hi … R ÷ W.lo
EXPECTED RENEWAL SPEND = R ÷ p.hi … R ÷ p.lo (= 50R … 100R)
The first line is a textbook expected value: odds of the event times its payoff, minus the certain cost. The second inverts it — the odds at which the renewal exactly pays for itself, with the optimistic end assuming a sale at the range top. The third is the geometric-wait arithmetic: at yearly odds p, the expected wait for a sale is 1/p years (50–100 years at typical odds), each of them billed. The formulas are elementary on purpose; they’re printed so you can check them.
The position bands
The position is where the break-even band sits against the typical 1–2%:
| Position | Condition |
|---|---|
| BREAKS EVEN BELOW TYPICAL ODDS | break-even high ≤ 1% |
| BREAKS EVEN INSIDE THE TYPICAL BAND | band overlaps 1–2% |
| REQUIRES ABOVE-TYPICAL ODDS | break-even low > 2% (multiple stated) |
The middle band is deliberately wide and deliberately labeled the judgment zone — for a large share of investor-grade names the arithmetic genuinely doesn’t decide, and pretending otherwise would be the false precision this site exists to oppose.
Two answers that aren’t bands
If the appraisal comes back as a floor verdict — renewal-cost territory, the honest answer for most registered domains — the expected-value line still prints, and it is decisively negative: even at 2% odds on a range that tops out under $100, a year of holding buys at most a couple of dollars of expected value. Holding such a name is a bet on what the data can’t see, and we say so rather than pricing the bet. If the domain is ultra-short (1–3 character .coms), the engine refuses — and we refuse the renewal arithmetic too, rather than compute an expected value over a range we declined to invent. For that class the renewal fee is noise against observed market prices.
Why this tool doesn’t exist elsewhere
The renew-or-drop advice you’ll find on the SERP is prose — “audit your portfolio, renewal fees add up” — and the appraisal tools nearest the decision are operated by registrars. There’s nothing conspiratorial about noting the structure: a registrar collects the renewal fee, so a registrar’s tool that routinely told you to stop paying it would be arguing against its own invoice. We don’t bill renewals. Our arithmetic is free to come out negative, and for most registered domains it honestly does — the same anti-flattery that drives our floor verdict and the bulk tool’s sell-through line.
What this can’t tell you
- Whether to renew. The tool prices the belief a renewal requires; whether you hold that belief — a trend, a category, a buyer you can picture — is yours to judge, and sometimes you’re right.
- Your domain’s actual odds. The 1–2% is a portfolio average over investor-grade names; a single domain’s odds can sit far from it in either direction. The break-even line exists precisely because of this variance.
- Everything expected value omits — the time value of money, the option value of deciding again next year, appreciation or decay of the name’s class, and any defensive or personal value: a domain that carries your project or your name is not priced by comparable sales at all.
- Everything the appraisal can’t model — trademarks, traffic, search demand, and the specific buyer. This tool inherits every limitation of the appraisal verbatim.
The longer treatment — the traps that renew bad domains, what actually happens after you stop paying (grace, redemption, the drop), and a one-hour yearly audit — is in our guide, when to let a domain expire.
Frequently asked questions
So should I drop it?
We can't tell you that, and the tool is built not to pretend otherwise. What it computes is the belief your renewal price requires: the yearly sale odds at which the fee exactly pays for itself, placed against the market's typical 1–2%. If renewal breaks even at 0.4%, holding is cheap insurance by the numbers; if it requires 6%, you're holding on a belief that this name is several times likelier to sell than average — which may be true! You may know something the model can't: a trend, a category, a buyer you can picture, a project of your own. The arithmetic doesn't forbid the belief; it prices it.
Why does the math use the wholesale range instead of retail?
Two reasons. Wholesale is the defensible anchor — it's read from reported investor-to-investor sales, while retail is derived from it by the ×2–3 guideline and inherits an extra layer of judgment. And the 1–2% sell-through figure is measured over portfolios whose sales mix includes both kinds of buyers, so pairing those odds with the retail range would quietly double-count optimism. Using wholesale keeps the expected value conservative and internally consistent. If your realistic scenario is an end-user sale at retail, the expected value is higher — and the odds of that specific event are lower — and you're back to the judgment the tool refuses to make for you.
Why do I have to type my renewal price instead of the tool knowing it?
Because any renewal price we baked in would be wrong for someone, and silently wrong is the failure mode this site exists to avoid. Renewal prices vary by TLD, by registrar, by promotional status, and premium names can renew at hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. Your registrar's renewal invoice is the one authoritative source, so the tool asks for it — an editable input you can see, rather than a stale constant you can't.
What does a 1–2% sell-through rate mean for my one domain?
It's a portfolio average across investor-grade names, not a property of your domain — your name's real odds could be far above or below it, and that variance is exactly why the headline output is the break-even odds rather than a verdict. What the average does honestly convey is scale: at typical odds the expected wait for a sale is 50–100 years, which is why the record also shows the renewals you'd expect to pay before a sale arrives. Most domains are held on hope; this line prices the hope.