Domain Availability Checker
A long time ago I gave up on the major retail domain registrars -- GoDaddy, Namecheap, the rest -- because the constant upselling and noisy interfaces just got to be too much. Eventually I landed on AWS Route 53 for domains, and honestly I have nothing bad to say about it: great prices, a clean management UI, a real API, and (refreshingly) zero pressure to buy a hundred adjacent things at checkout. It's quietly become my favorite part of the AWS ecosystem.
Searching for new domains is its own headache, though. It's surprisingly non-trivial to get a clean availability check without falling back on shell tricks and parsing whois output (which sometimes lies to you anyway). And not long ago I tried a third-party Claude skill for bulk availability checking -- and one of the domains I queried through it ended up purchased by someone else the very next day. That was enough to convince me to just build my own.
This is a small web app that wraps the Route 53 Domains API: enter a domain, get back availability and current registration pricing, and use the Riff button to surface similar ideas via Route 53's suggestions endpoint. Results are cached for 24 hours, the public is rate-limited to a small number of free checks, and -- most importantly -- nothing about your queries is stored beyond that basic cache. No watchlist, no telemetry, no front-running. Built primarily so I could comfortably point Claude at it for bulk searches, but if it's useful to anyone else, even better.