Indie Product Domains in 2026: .ai Has Peaked and .io Is Fading

Almost half of indie products still launch on .com. Of the 5,098 live products on Awesome Indie that have a domain of their own, 46.0% end in .com, 14.1% in .ai, 9.0% in .io and 6.2% in .app. .com has led every year since 2021. What has changed is everything below .com, and each shift has a story behind it: an island government that now gets almost half its revenue from domain fees, a sovereignty treaty that could one day retire an entire ending, and a browser security list.

The clearest change is .ai. It went from 1.6% of products submitted in 2021 to 17.1% in 2025, then fell back to 13.0% in 2026. That drop is not because makers build less AI: products tagged with an AI category were 48.1% of 2025 submissions and 46.6% of 2026 ones (45.6% if you stop at August 9, before we changed how new products get their categories). Inside that AI group, .com won back ground from .ai.

Meanwhile .io has fallen every single year, from 13.4% of 2021 submissions to 6.2% in 2026, and .app is quietly climbing back to 7.8%. Below are the numbers, the news behind each ending, and what we would weigh before buying a domain this week.

What domain endings do indie products use in 2026?#

• .com46%
• .ai14.1%
• .io9%
• .app6.2%
• .co3.2%
• .net3%
• .org2.8%
• .dev1.5%
• .pro1%
• 157 other endings13.4%

5,098 live products on Awesome Indie with a domain of their own, November 13, 2026. Products on app stores, code hosts and free hosting subdomains (1.8% of live products) are excluded. Rounded, so the bars add up to 100.2%.

Show the numbers

.com	46%
.ai	14.1%
.io	9%
.app	6.2%
.co	3.2%
.net	3%
.org	2.8%
.dev	1.5%
.pro	1%
157 other endings	13.4%

Three things stand out.

First, .com is about as dominant among indie makers as on the wider internet. Verisign reported 182.5 million .com and .net registrations at the end of September 2026, out of 411.6 million domains across every ending, so about 44% for the two together. Domain Name Wire's read of the previous quarter's report put .com alone at over 40%. Our 46.0% sits right next to that baseline.

Second, country codes play a very different role here. 31.8% of live products use a two-letter country-code ending, which sounds ordinary until you see which ones: 72.4% of them are .ai or .io. Worldwide, the largest endings after .com are China's .cn and Germany's .de. Among our live products, .cn appears twice and .de five times. Indie makers do not use country codes for countries. They use them for what the two letters spell.

.ai is the extreme case. Anguilla's ending passed one million registrations in January 2026, well under 1% of all registered domains, yet it is on one in seven live indie products.

Third, very few makers skip owning a domain. Only 1.8% of live products point at an App Store page, a Google Play listing, a GitHub repository or a free subdomain on hosts like vercel.app or github.io. We left those out of every share in this report: a product hosted on github.com did not choose .com. (For what those products are built and hosted on, see our indie hacker tech stack report.)

How did indie domain choices change from 2021 to 2026?#

• .com
• .ai
• .io
• .app

0%20%40%60%

.com.ai.io.app

202120222023202420252026

Products that passed review (launched or scheduled), by year submitted, own domains only. 2021 to 2023 are small samples of 254 to 342 products; 2026 runs to November 13.

Show the numbers

Series	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026
.com	46.5%	58.2%	50.8%	47.4%	43%	48.6%
.ai	1.6%	2.6%	10.9%	14.3%	17.1%	13%
.io	13.4%	12.3%	11.3%	10.9%	7.7%	6.2%
.app	8.7%	7%	4.9%	4.8%	6.1%	7.8%

Read the early years with care. 2021, 2022 and 2023 each have fewer than 350 products, so a swing of a few points there is a handful of launches. From 2024 onward every year has more than 1,000 products and the lines are steadier.

.com never fell below 43% and was back at 48.6% in 2026, rising to 50.2% in the second half of the year. The interesting movement is in the smaller endings, so we take them one at a time.

Why did .ai rise, and why is it falling?#

The rise needs little explanation. .ai went from 2.6% of 2022 submissions to 10.9% in 2023 and 14.3% in 2024, as AI products went from 8.5% of our 2022 submissions to 43.8% of 2024's. The ending works almost purely as a label: 83.5% of live .ai products carry an AI category, and AI products (the kind in our artificial intelligence category) use it seven times as often as everyone else: 28.5% against 3.9%.

The money behind it is extraordinary. The IMF reported that .ai registrations rose from 144,000 in 2022 to 354,000 in 2023, earning Anguilla EC$87 million (about US$32 million), just over 20% of government revenue that year. In January 2025 the registry company Identity Digital moved .ai onto its platform with more than 600,000 names. Ministry of Finance figures put Anguilla's 2025 domain revenue at EC$230 million, about US$85.3 million. In September 2026 the Premier said domain fees had brought in EC$217 million (US$80 million) in the first seven months of the year, 47.5% of all government revenue to date.

In 2024 the IMF noted that the government expected .ai to settle at around 15% of revenue. It is now about three times that. For a maker, that cuts both ways: a registry whose government depends on it for almost half its income has every reason to keep it running well, and every reason to charge for it. On March 5, 2026, the wholesale price of the two-year minimum registration went from $140 to $160, a 14% rise.

Our data shows .ai peaking before that price change. Its share of products that passed review was 20.5% in the first half of 2025, 14.6% in the second half, 15.5% in the first half of 2026 and 11.1% since July. The decline also shows across every product submitted to us, rejected ones included (14.2% in 2025, 12.4% in 2026), so it is not an artifact of our review.

• .com
• .ai

0%20%40%60%

.com.ai

2023202420252026

Products that passed review and carry at least one AI category, own domains only. 2023 has 91 such products; later years have several hundred or more.

Show the numbers

Series	2023	2024	2025	2026
.com	46.2%	41.2%	33.2%	39%
.ai	23.1%	27.3%	30.6%	23.5%

The comparison that matters is within AI products themselves. Among products tagged with an AI category, .ai's share went from 30.6% in 2025 to 23.5% in 2026, while .com's rose from 33.2% to 39.0%. Makers building AI products in 2026 pick .com more often than they did a year earlier.

One plausible reading is that "AI" stopped being a differentiator once nearly half of all launches carried it. Another is cost. Our data cannot separate the two. What it does show is that makers who want the signal without the ending put it in the name: 11.6% of live AI products on .com have a name ending in "ai" (brand plus "ai", dot com), against 0.6% of other .com products.

Is the .io domain going away?#

Not yet, and possibly not at all. But the risk is real, and it is now well documented.

.io is the country code of the British Indian Ocean Territory, the Chagos Archipelago, and IANA's root zone database lists its manager as Internet Computer Bureau, care of an address on Diego Garcia. On October 3, 2024, the UK and Mauritius announced that the UK would agree Mauritius is sovereign over the archipelago, including Diego Garcia. The treaty was signed on May 22, 2025.

Then it stalled. The US withheld the formal written consent the treaty needs, and in April 2026 the UK government shelved the implementing bill after it ran out of parliamentary time, with no plan to reintroduce it. The treaty is signed but not in force.

Why makers care: under the ccTLD retirement policy ICANN's board adopted in September 2022, a country-code domain loses its eligibility when its code is removed from the ISO 3166-1 standard. IANA then removes it from the DNS root after five years by default, with extensions of up to five more, so ten years at most. A removed ending stops resolving, which takes websites and email down with it.

Removal is not automatic. Kim Davies, who runs IANA services at ICANN, wrote in November 2024 that "it is not a foregone conclusion that a change in sovereignty will result in a change to the .io domain", since the trigger is the ISO 3166-1 code, not the treaty itself. It has happened before, though: Yugoslavia's .yu was deleted in April 2010, and Portuguese Timor's .tp lingered for about a decade after .tl replaced it.

There is also money pushing for continuity. The registry's UK company, owned by Identity Digital, reported £31.6 million ($42.4 million) of revenue in 2024. As of this writing, IANA still lists .io as an active country-code domain.

Makers did not wait for the outcome. .io's share was already sliding (13.4% in 2021, 10.9% in 2024), then it dropped from 13.5% of products submitted in the last quarter of 2024 to 7.7% in the first quarter of 2025, the first full quarter after the announcement. It has kept falling, to 6.2% in 2026 and 4.8% since October. We cannot prove the treaty caused it, and we see when products were submitted, not when their domains were bought. The timing is still hard to ignore.

Why is .app growing again?#

.app fell from 8.7% of 2021 submissions to 4.8% in 2024, then climbed back to 7.8% in 2026 and 8.5% in the second half of the year. It is a different kind of ending from .ai and .io: a generic domain run by Google Registry, with no government or territory behind it.

Its one technical quirk is HTTPS. .app and its sibling .dev are on the HSTS preload list built into browsers, so browsers only load .app sites over HTTPS and a site needs a valid certificate before it loads at all; the same applies to .dev. On a modern host that issues certificates automatically, that changes nothing. If you point a domain at a server by hand, it is the first thing to check, and our launch readiness check tests HTTPS and the certificate.

Endings also sort products by type. 52.7% of live .dev products are tagged as developer tools, against 9.5% of all live products, and .app leans toward productivity tools (24.8% against 11.9%). .io is only modestly more developer-heavy than average (13.8% tagged developer tools).

What do indie domain names look like?#

Short names are what the alternative endings buy. The median live product's name before the dot is 10 characters on .com and 8 on .ai, .io and .dev. Only 9.2% of .com names have six characters or fewer. On .ai it is 35.0%.

• .dev43.2%
• .ai35%
• .io24.7%
• .app22.2%
• .co19.3%
• .com9.2%

Live products with their own domain. Length is the name before the ending, hyphens not counted. .dev is a small group (74 products).

Show the numbers

.dev	43.2%
.ai	35%
.io	24.7%
.app	22.2%
.co	19.3%
.com	9.2%

The workarounds people talk about are rarer than you might think. Names that start with get, try, use, join or hey are 2.0% of live products, and 67.0% of those are on .com, which is what you would expect if the prefix is the price of getting a .com. Hyphens appear in 4.6% of names and digits in 2.8%, and 2.0% of products live on a subdomain (app., tools.) of a bigger site. Across all live products, the median name is nine characters long.

How should you choose a domain in 2026?#

Our data can tell you what makers pick. It cannot tell you whether an ending helps a product succeed, and we would distrust anyone who claims to know. Here is what the evidence does support.

Start with .com, and accept a longer name to get it. Nearly half of indie products use it, so do over 40% of all registered domains, and its price is the most predictable. Verisign's contract with ICANN lets it raise .com prices by up to 7% in four of every six years, and the wholesale price went from $10.26 to $10.97 on November 1, 2026. A 10-character .com is normal here, not a compromise.

Price .ai over five years, not one. At $160 wholesale for the two-year minimum, .ai costs about seven times as much as a .com per year before any registrar margin, and it rose 14% in one step this year. We found no published cap on future increases, and the government that owns the ending now earns almost half its revenue from these fees. Budget for prices to follow demand.

Treat .io as a domain with a known, slow exit risk. Nothing is being retired today. If IO ever leaves the ISO standard, policy gives five to ten years to move, which is enough time, but moving a brand, its backlinks and its email is real work. If you are on .io already, own a fallback on a generic ending and keep it redirecting to your site. The same logic applies, more weakly, to the other country codes used for their letters (.co, .me, .so, .sh, .gg, .to and a few more), which together are 6.0% of live products.

Pick .app or .dev only if HTTPS everywhere suits you. It almost always does now. Test before launch day anyway.

Put your email on the domain you intend to keep longest. Email is among the most painful things to move when a domain changes, and it fails along with the website if an ending is ever removed from the root. We looked for rigorous public evidence that .ai or .io senders land in spam more often than .com senders and found none, so we are not making that claim.

Do not expect the ending to sell the product. Fewer AI makers treat .ai as required: its share among AI products fell seven points in a year. If you need name ideas, makers have launched domain name tools in our directory, and once the name is settled you can submit the product with nothing but the website.

How we got these numbers#

• Snapshot. All figures come from Awesome Indie's production database, read on November 13, 2026, with a read-only connection.
• Live products (the first and last charts, and name statistics). 5,191 products with the status LISTED, meaning launched and public. 93 of them (1.8%) sit on a shared host and were excluded, leaving 5,098.
• Trends by year (the two line charts). Products that passed review, meaning launched or accepted and scheduled for a future launch day, grouped by the year they were submitted. 2021 includes one product dated December 2020, and dozens of 2021 records share a single creation date, so early dates are approximate. 2021, 2022 and 2023 have 254, 342 and 266 products; each later year has more than 1,000. 2026 runs from January 1 to November 13. Shared hosts (2.1% of this group) were excluded.
• How the ending is read. We take each product's website URL as stored today, strip "www.", and read the last label of the hostname as the ending. We use the ICANN section of the Public Suffix List to find the registrable name, so a site on example.co.uk counts as .uk and its name is "example". Name length counts the characters of that name, hyphens excluded.
• Shared hosts. Our own list of app stores, extension stores, package registries, code hosts, storefronts, social networks and free hosting subdomains (vercel.app, netlify.app, github.io, pages.dev and others). The biggest groups among live products were the App Store, GitHub Pages and Vercel.
• AI products. A product counts as AI if it has any of our AI categories (artificial intelligence, AI agents, AI coding, AI image, AI video, AI writing). Category tags are imperfect, so some products are mislabeled either way.
• Caveats. We see when a product was submitted, not when its domain was bought, so changes show up late. Our population is makers who chose to launch on a directory, which may not represent every indie product. Our review shapes who is counted; for the .ai and .io trends we checked every submission, rejected ones included, and found the same direction. Outside figures are as reported by the sources below; domain prices quoted are wholesale, and what you pay at a registrar is higher.

Sources#

1. Verisign, "Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2026" (October 2026): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001014473/000101447326000039/vrsn-20260930.htm
2. Verisign, "Domain Name Industry Brief Quarterly Report: DNIB.com Announces 411.6 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Third Quarter of 2026" (October 2026): https://blog.verisign.com/domain-names/q3-2026-domain-name-industry-brief-quarterly-report/
3. Domain Name Wire, "Internet tops 400 million domain names" (July 2026): https://domainnamewire.com/2026/07/27/internet-tops-400-million-domain-names/
4. Anguilla Focus, "Anguilla's .ai domain hits one million registrations amid global AI boom" (January 2026): https://anguillafocus.com/anguillas-ai-domain-hits-one-million-registrations-amid-global-ai-boom/
5. International Monetary Fund, "An AI-Powered Boost to Anguilla's Revenues" (May 2024): https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/2024/05/15/cf-an-ai-powered-boost-to-anguillas-revenues
6. Identity Digital, ".ai Completes a Historic Migration to the Identity Digital Platform" (January 2025): https://identity.digital/newsroom/ai-completes-a-historic-migration-to-the-identity-digital-platform
7. Anguilla Focus, ".ai domain surge brings EC$230m windfall to Anguilla in 2025" (March 2026): https://anguillafocus.com/ai-domain-surge-brings-ec230m-windfall-to-anguilla-in-2025/
8. The Gleaner, "Anguilla's AI domain registration earns US$80m year-to-date, more than all taxes from productive sector" (October 2026): https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20261009/anguillas-ai-domain-registration-earns-us80m-year-date-more-all-taxes
9. Domain Name Wire, ".AI domain name prices going up $20" (February 2026): https://domainnamewire.com/2026/02/02/ai-domain-name-prices-going-up-20/
10. IANA, ".io Top-Level Domain" (root zone database record, last updated November 2026): https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/io.html
11. GOV.UK, "UK and Mauritius joint statement, 3 October 2024" (October 2024): https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-between-uk-and-mauritius-3-october-2024
12. GOV.UK, "UK/Mauritius: Agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago including Diego Garcia [CS Mauritius No.1/2025]" (May 2025): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ukmauritius-agreement-concerning-the-chagos-archipelago-including-diego-garcia-cs-mauritius-no12025
13. Domain Incite, ".io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty" (May 2025): https://domainincite.com/31086-io-questions-in-sharp-focus-as-uk-signs-chagos-treaty
14. Domain Incite, ".io safe for now as Trump puts Chagos deal on ice" (April 2026): https://domainincite.com/31642-io-safe-for-now-as-trump-puts-chagos-deal-on-ice
15. The Conversation, "Chagos Islands deal shelved: legal expert explains what happens next" (April 2026): https://theconversation.com/chagos-islands-deal-shelved-legal-expert-explains-what-happens-next-280493
16. IANA, "Retirement of a Country-code Top-level Domain (ccTLD)" (revised March 2024): https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-retirement
17. ICANN, "The Chagos Archipelago and the .io domain" (November 2024): https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-chagos-archipelago-and-the-io-domain-14-11-2024-en
18. Domain Incite, "Five times ICANN deleted a ccTLD, and what it means for .io" (October 2024): https://domainincite.com/30406-five-times-icann-deleted-a-cctld-and-what-it-means-for-io
19. Domain Incite, ".io sales almost double over three years" (October 2025): https://domainincite.com/31401-io-sales-almost-double-over-three-years
20. Google Registry, ".app Domain for Apps, Startups & SaaS Products" (accessed November 2026): https://www.registry.google/domains/app/
21. Google Registry, ".dev Domain for Developers & Technologists" (accessed November 2026): https://www.registry.google/domains/dev/