.si is the country-code top-level domain of Slovenia, administered by ARNES, the national research and education network. That is the boring half of the story, and it is also the half that makes everything else work: it is a real registry with real policy, not a marketing construct.
The interesting half is what two letters spell in English. SuperIntelligence — readable in .si without adding a single character, and without the AI prefix fatigue that has already worn thin.
What actually changed in the last two years
Every company that builds with models needs a name, and the obvious ones are gone. In .ai, single English words sit in the six figures or are simply not for sale; in .com, the same words have been company names for twenty years. That squeeze sends founders looking at two-letter country codes — a search that used to be considered eccentric and is now standard practice.
Measured against that demand, .si is unusually empty. ARNES publishes its registrations, so you can check any name yourself rather than waiting for a broker to answer: we do exactly that on every page of this site, straight from the registry, with DNS as a second witness.
The honest comparison
| .si | .ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Registry | ARNES (Slovenia) | Anguilla ccTLD |
| Renewal, ordinary name | roughly $11–30 / year | typically $60–120 / year, plus premium tiers |
| Single dictionary words | still findable | largely taken or priced in six figures |
| Marketplace depth | thin but real — 285 tracked sales | deep, liquid, expensive |
| Buyer recognition | rising, requires one sentence of explanation | immediate |
That last row is the whole trade. .ai needs no explanation and costs accordingly. .si costs an order of magnitude less and needs you to say "superintelligence" once — which is precisely why the names are still there.
Who .si actually suits
- A profitable micro-SaaS. A single dictionary word as the product name, at a renewal that never becomes a line item.
- Agency and studio brands. Short, memorable, and cheap enough to hold five of them while you decide.
- European businesses, where a .si name reads as a normal European presence rather than an oddity — and where NIS2-era privacy rules apply to the registry itself.
- Domain investors who price from data: median $2,500, with a real five-figure tail.
Who should not bother
If your customers type your name from an advert and forget it five minutes later, an expensive .com is not your problem and a cheap .si will not fix it. If you need instant recognition with a non-technical audience, buy the .com. And if you plan to resell within a month, remember the aftermarket here is 285 sales deep — patience is part of the position, not a nuisance.
The one-sentence version
.si is not a cheap .ai. It is the same idea in two letters, with a real registry behind it, a market you can measure, and a price that lets you keep the name long enough for it to matter.
Check your name against the registry on the home page, price it on the appraisal, or read what actually sold on the sales index.
Figures reflect the worthly.si index as of 15 October 2026 (285 tracked sales); the live index is on /sales.
Check a name while you are here.
Registry-accurate availability and a value range that shows its comparables — free, no account.
