Every developer I know has had the same moment. You finally come up with a project name you actually like. You type it into a registrar. It's taken. You add "app" to the end. Also taken. You try "get" in front. Parked since 2013. You settle on a five-word hyphenated compound that no human will ever type correctly, and you ship anyway.
I want to make a small argument for doing something different: consider a .vegas domain.
I know, I know. Bear with me for 700 words.
The TL;DR
.vegasis a geographic top-level domain, not a gimmick TLD. It was delegated in 2014 and is operated by the City of Las Vegas.- Premium one-word names are still largely available. Two-word names are almost entirely open.
- Prices are comparable to
.com— typically around $15-$40/year at most registrars. - You do not need to live in or be associated with Las Vegas to register one.
- It's memorable in a way generic TLDs are not.
If that's enough to make you go check availability, great. If not, here's the longer case.
The "just ship" argument
Naming paralysis is the silent killer of side projects. I've watched more than one developer friend spend three weekends on branding and zero weekends on code. A lot of that paralysis comes from bouncing off unavailable .coms.
The value of moving to a different TLD isn't that it's better than .com in the abstract. It's that it restores the space of good names. The name you actually wanted — the short, clean, one-word version — is probably available on .vegas right now. You can register it today and get back to building.
The "memorable" argument
Generic TLDs (.io, .dev, .app) solve the availability problem but they don't really say anything. .vegas says something. Even if your project has nothing to do with gambling, entertainment, or the Strip, the word itself carries associations: bold, confident, larger-than-life, a little unserious in a way that can be charming.
That flavor is free branding. payments.vegas sounds like a product. stream.vegas sounds like a product. notes.vegas sounds like a product you'd want to at least click on.
Compare that to notes-app-v2.io.
"But what about SEO / email / trust?"
A few practical notes, because developers always want them:
SEO. Google has repeatedly said that new TLDs are treated the same as legacy TLDs for ranking. Geographic TLDs can carry a soft local signal but otherwise behave like any other domain. Your content and backlinks matter far more than your suffix.
Email deliverability. Modern mail providers (Gmail, Fastmail, Proton, etc.) handle new TLDs fine. Where you'll occasionally see trouble is enterprise spam filters that haven't updated their allowlists in a decade. If your audience is large enterprises with aggressive filters, test before committing.
User trust. This one is real but overstated. Users have been trained on .com, yes, but they've also seen .io, .ai, .dev, .xyz, .co become normal. A clean, short .vegas name in an address bar doesn't look suspicious — it looks distinctive.
Who this isn't for
A few honest caveats:
- If your project is a direct-to-consumer app that needs to look as trustworthy as a bank to a 65-year-old, stick with
.com. - If you plan to run a serious email newsletter to enterprise buyers, check with your ESP first.
- If you've already got traction on another domain, don't move for aesthetic reasons.
Who it is for
- Indie hackers launching something this weekend and tired of domain-squatter prices.
- Developers naming an internal tool, CLI, API, or documentation site.
- Anyone who actually has a Vegas connection and wants to lean into it.
- Anyone who wants a name that sounds like a product, not a Kubernetes cluster.
A concrete exercise
Open a new tab. Think of the one-word name you actually wanted for your current project — the one that was taken. Go check it on .vegas. I'd be surprised if it isn't available.
That's really the whole argument. The best names you've been priced out of on the legacy TLDs are sitting on the shelf, at sticker price, on a TLD that makes your project sound a little cooler than it probably is.
You don't need to love Las Vegas to see the value. You just need to have spent one too many hours in a registrar search box.
Ship the thing.
If you've got a .vegas domain running in production, I'd love to hear what you're building in the comments.