DomCop alternative for domain resellers, with DomCop pricing compared

What is the best alternative to DomCop?

The best alternative to DomCop depends on what you do with the names. For SEO buyers who want cheaper link metrics, SpamZilla covers similar ground from about $37 a month. For resellers and brand buyers, the best alternative is a tool that prices the name for an end user and catches it at the drop, because DomCop's metrics describe backlinks, not what a business would pay. Domaining does that from $49 a month with 25 backorders included.

Most people who search for a DomCop alternative have already used it and hit one of two walls. Either the monthly bill is high for how many names they actually buy, or they realize that a long list of high Trust Flow names still leaves the buying, the pricing and the reselling to them. This article is for US domain investors and small portfolio holders in the second group, with numbers for both.

How much does DomCop cost?

DomCop's pricing page lists three monthly plans: Starter at $98 a month for one user, Pro at $148 a month, and Team from $246 a month for three seats, with each extra seat at $49. Its personal crawler adds $50, $250 or $450 a month for 10, 30 or 50 slots on Pro and Team. Annual billing saves up to 40%. There is no free trial, but first purchases carry a 14 day money back guarantee.

That last point matters more than the plan price. A buyer who picks up eight names a month from DomCop's NameJet pre-release list pays the subscription plus at least $79 per name at NameJet, so around $730 a month on Starter before any contested auction. Prices here come from DomCop's own pricing page and can change.

What DomCop does well

DomCop is good at volume and data. It shows more than 3 million names in auction at any time and over 10 million that expired in the past 30 days, across 224 extensions and nine marketplaces and drop lists, including GoDaddy, NameJet, SnapNames, Dynadot and Namecheap auctions. Every row carries bought third-party metrics: Majestic Trust Flow and Citation Flow, Moz Domain Authority, Ahrefs Domain Rating, SEMrush data, Open PageRank, Wayback Machine history and even an EstiBot appraisal, more than 90 metrics in all.

Its personal crawler is the other strong feature. You give it a site, a keyword or a list of URLs, it crawls outbound links on DomCop's servers and reports the domains that are now free to register, with metrics attached. For someone building niche sites around topical backlinks, that is hard to replace. A team that wants full control over what gets crawled can run the same idea on its own stack with a web scraping API, but it is more work than DomCop's ready list.

Where DomCop stops for a reseller

Three gaps show up as soon as you buy names to sell rather than to link from.

• Link metrics are not resale value

  A name with Trust Flow 30 from an old charity blog may be worth $20 to an end user, and a clean two word .com with no links at all may be worth $3,000. DomCop sorts by the first kind of signal. An end user buyer pays for the second.

• You still buy every name somewhere else

  DomCop points you to the auction or drop list. Placing the order, paying per catch and fighting the auction happens on four or five other sites, each with its own account and fee.

• Nothing happens after the catch

  There is no pricing, listing, offer handling or escrow. A reseller ends up adding a marketplace, an appraisal tool and an escrow service to the DomCop bill.

Domaining is built around those gaps. The expired domain names list is scored for resale value, a score you can read line by line on the domain value estimator. Backorders are part of the plan, placed by hand or by backorder rules, and won names can be listed on the marketplace with escrow and no commission.

DomCop alternatives compared

The tools US buyers most often weigh against DomCop, with what each costs and who it suits. Prices come from each vendor's page or recent independent reviews, so check them before you pay.

If upstream inventory is what you want, it helps to know where it comes from. Expired Bluehost and HostGator names now go to NameJet and SnapNames first, and the ones nobody orders there drop at the registry, which our Bluehost expired domain backorder page walks through day by day.

Is DomCop better than SpamZilla?

DomCop is better if you want the widest set of metrics, a niche crawler and team seats, and you will use them every week. SpamZilla is better value for most solo SEO buyers, since its paid plan starts around $37 a month against DomCop's $98, and its spam score does a lot of the filtering for you. Neither one buys, prices or resells the names, so for a reseller the choice between them matters less than it looks.

We compared SpamZilla on its own terms in the SpamZilla alternative review, including the cases where we would still pick it.

Is DomCop worth it?

DomCop is worth it if backlink metrics are the reason you buy, you buy every week, and you would use the crawler to find names in your niche. It is rarely worth it for a reseller buying a few names a month, because $98 to $148 goes on research alone and every catch still costs $59 to $79 or an auction price. Its 14 day money back guarantee makes a one month test low risk.

A quick break-even: a reseller catching eight names a month pays about $98 to DomCop plus at least $472 to $632 in per-catch fees, so $570 to $730. On Domaining's Pro plan, $149 a month covers 150 backorders, and a caught name costs only its registration fee unless other members backorder it too, in which case a private auction among them decides the price.

Switching from DomCop in one afternoon

You do not need to cancel before you test. This is the routine we would run for a reseller moving off DomCop.

1. 1

   Export your saved DomCop searches

   Write down the filters you actually use: extensions, length, age, keyword lists. Ignore the metric filters that only matter for backlinks.

2. 2

   Rebuild them as backorder rules

   Turn each search into a rule with extensions, a minimum value score and a price cap, so matching names are ordered from every day's drop list without you opening it.

3. 3

   Score your shortlist side by side

   Paste the names you would have bought from DomCop into the domain appraisal tool and see which ones still clear your price once link metrics are taken out.

4. 4

   Run both for one billing cycle

   Keep DomCop for a month and count which tool sourced the names you sold. Cancel the one that did not pay for itself.

Won names can go straight onto the domain marketplace with a buy-now price or offers, and the sale closes through escrow with no commission. For how the catching side compares across services, see the best domain backorder service guide.

Domaining is not affiliated with DomCop, SpamZilla, ExpiredDomains.net, NameJet or SnapNames. Prices and feature counts come from their public pages and independent reviews and can change.