.com is the default, and most of the time it is the right answer. We are not going to argue with that. The useful question is narrower: for which startups is a two-letter .si name the better purchase, and what does the choice cost in return? We track the .si aftermarket, so we can answer the second half of that with numbers.
What our record covers, and what it does not
Our set is 234 tracked .si sales, all of them .si: median $3,599, average $5,085, largest $50,000 for staffing.si through Spaceship. We do not track .com sales, so we will not print a .com price beside a .si price and call the comparison measured. Every figure below is .si. The .com side is described in behaviour, not dollars.
Where .si is genuinely strong: two characters
The shortest bucket in our data is also the most expensive. Two-character .si names sold at an average of $6,736 across 12 sales, the highest average of any length we track, ahead of four-character ($4,769, 37 sales) and five-character ($4,774, 47 sales).
Read that carefully. Twelve sales is a thin sample and a single large result can move it, so we would not build a plan on the gap between $6,736 and $4,769. The direction, though, is consistent with what a two-letter extension can offer: a name that is short, pronounceable, and still unregistered. In .com that combination has been out of reach for a seed-stage company for twenty years.
The trade, side by side
| .si | .com (the default) | |
|---|---|---|
| Registry | ARNES, Slovenia, with public RDAP | commercial registry |
| Who may register | anyone worldwide, no residency | anyone |
| Ordinary renewal | roughly $11–30 / year | varies; premium names priced separately |
| Short names still available | yes, including single words | largely gone or auctioned |
| Aftermarket depth | 234 tracked sales, median $3,599 | deep and fast, at a higher entry price |
| Registry privacy | not offered — EU identity matching applies | depends on registrar and jurisdiction |
| Buyer recognition | needs one sentence of explanation | none needed |
That last row is the trade in one line. You are buying a shorter, cheaper name and paying for it in explanation.
What actually clears five figures in .si
The top of our record is instructive because it is so uniform. The ten largest tracked sales are staffing.si at $50,000, gifts.si at $31,346, hollywood.si at $30,000, runtime.si at $28,888, pure.si at $26,868, stocks.si at $25,000, healthy.si at $23,000, and then caspian.si, dubai.si and plasma.si at $20,000 each. Every one is a single word, and nearly every one is a word a company would name itself after. None is a two-word phrase, and none is a made-up string.
That is the test to apply to any .si name you are weighing against a .com: does it sit in the same family as those ten, or is it a phrase that the .com would have handled better anyway? A two-word descriptive name is not a five-figure .si asset, and rarity alone does not change that.
Four situations where .si is the better buy
- The exact word you need is gone in .com but open in .si. A business that trades on one noun, an industry term or a category, is better off owning that noun in a real registry than owning a hyphenated or invented .com substitute.
- Your domain is not your acquisition channel. If customers arrive through an app store, an integration, a sales call or a developer community, nobody types the address. The extension stops being a trust marker and becomes a label.
- You will hold the name for years. At roughly $11–30 a year a .si renewal is never a budget line, which lets a small team keep the name while the product finds its shape instead of renting a .com it cannot renew through a slow year.
- Your audience reads two-letter European endings as normal. Across Europe a country code is an ordinary company address. The awkwardness is mostly a North American reflex.
Three situations where .com still wins
- Your traffic is typed from ads, radio or memory. An audience that has never seen .si will finish the address with .com out of habit, and you pay for that in leaked visits.
- Trust is the product. Payments, health, and procurement-led contracts are places where someone asks "are these people real?" before the first call. A .com answers that question for you.
- You need the registrant kept private. .si does not offer registry privacy protection, because the EU identity-matching rules require the registrant to be verifiable. If your operators need anonymity in the registry, that is a real cost, not a footnote.
A rule you can apply today
Ask one question: does anyone reach this business by typing its name? If yes, buy the .com and treat the .si as a defensive hold. If no, compare the .si name you can actually get against the .com you can afford. When the .si is shorter, is the exact word, and renews for under $30, the cheaper name is the better asset.
What the numbers cannot settle
Our 234 sales are a young, thin record: 197 reported in 2026, 37 undated, and 87 logged with no venue named at all. That is enough to describe the middle of the .si market and not enough to forecast one name's outcome, so treat these figures as calibration rather than a valuation. Run your own name through the appraisal to see a range with its arithmetic shown, read the comparable sales on the sales index, and check what owners are currently asking on the for-sale list. How it works explains where every number on this site comes from.
Check a name while you are here.
Registry-accurate availability and a value range that shows its comparables — free, no account.
