How agents get a
hostname.

Eleven ways an AI agent can go from "I built a thing" to "it has a URL" — compared on what they actually cost, what they demand of you, and whether an agent can drive them unattended. Two tables, because there are two different questions: buy a domain you own, or get a free subdomain pointed at what you built. For a head-to-head against two paid rivals with public pricing — agentdomain.app's USDC checkout and MCPDomain's Stripe checkout — see free vs the paid rivals.

Registrars verified 2026-08-23 · free subdomains verified 2026-09-03 · we run one of these, read accordingly

$0 — here's why. Our row costs nothing because a subdomain of a domain we already operate has no registry fee behind it. Free covers 10 names with every feature and no card in the flow. An optional Pro plan ($5/month) raises that to 100 names; it takes nothing away from free. What each does and does not buy is set out on pricing.

How to read this table. Every figure comes from the provider's own public pricing or documentation pages — listed with links directly below the table — or from a live API call to that provider. Anything we could not verify is left blank and marked unverified rather than filled in from memory or a plausible guess. Prices move and products change: everything here was verified on 23 August 2026. Check the sources before you rely on a number.
The one difference that matters most. AgentDomains gives you a subdomain — yourname.makes.fyi — that we operate. You do not own it, you cannot transfer it to another registrar, and it exists as long as we keep running. Every other row on this table registers a real second-level domain that you own and can take elsewhere. If the name is disposable scaffolding for something an agent just built, that difference costs you nothing. If it is going to matter in two years, pay for a real domain.

The table

Provider Cost to first working hostname Account / KYC Payment method SSL DNS API coverage CLI / MCP
AgentDomainsagentdomains.co $0 — free subdomain of makes.fyi or agentdomains.co. Nothing to pay for up to 10 names. No account, no KYC: one unauthenticated POST /v1/signup returns an API key. But an email is required the first time you register a name, and a human must click the link we send within 30 days or the name and the account are deleted. None to start. No card, no wallet, no balance to top up. Optional Pro (100 names) is a card via Stripe. No certificate issuance. Two honest paths instead: reverse-proxy mode terminates TLS at our edge with our certificate, or we publish the ACME DNS-01 TXT record so your own client issues a Let's Encrypt cert. A plain public server can just use HTTP-01. A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT; nameserver delegation; URL forwarding; reverse proxy. Records can be added and deleted one at a time, and an account can delete itself. No MX, no DNSSEC, no batch operations. Both. Go CLI (agentdomains), MCP over stdio (npx -y agentdomains-mcp) and hosted at mcp.agentdomains.co, plus a Claude Code skill.
agentdomain.appagentdomain.app $14.33 for a .com, first year — live quote on 2026-08-23: $10.18 domain + $3.90 platform fee + $0.25 optional basename. Cheapest TLD seen was .xyz at $2.06 + the $3.90 fee. Optional premium plans from $59/yr. None claimed: "No accounts, no KYC." You do need a Base-mainnet wallet holding USDC. Discovery, availability and quotes need no auth at all. USDC over x402 on Base only. EIP-3009 signed locally, Coinbase CDP facilitator. No card or fiat path documented. Included, $0. Cloudflare for SaaS certificates on apex domains; quote API returns sslIncluded: true. Deepest of the six: full CRUD, batch merge/replace with dry-run, BIND zone import and export, 13 record types, plus a programmable email API. MCP only. npx @agentdomain/mcp-server, v0.7.0 published 2026-08-23. No CLI. ⚠ repo: personal account, 0 stars, 16 commits
DomainForAgentsdomainforagents.io $15.52/yr for a .com, from their public search page. No per-TLD price table is published, so every other TLD: unverified. None: "No email required." One unauthenticated POST returns an API key plus a claim_code a human can use to adopt the account later. No KYC. Four routes: prepaid Stripe balance, card submitted by the agent at purchase, USDC on Solana, or a Stripe payment link for a human to settle later. Not documented. No SSL or certificate endpoint appears anywhere in their API reference. Absence in the docs is not the same as a stated "no", so this stays blank rather than becoming a claim. Full CRUD plus replace-all, custom nameservers, 8 record types, webhooks, and an OpenAPI 3.1 spec for auto-discovery. MCP only. npx @domainforagents/mcp, 16 tools. npm shows v1.2.1 last published 2026-04-13. No CLI.
Namefinamefi.io $10.88/yr for a .com (register and renew the same), from their open availability API. .xyz $1.99 first year, $13.17 renewal. Either an API key / OAuth 2.1 account, or no account at all via the x402 wallet path. Availability search needs no auth. KYC policy: unverified — not mentioned on any page loaded. Namefi Service Credits (NFSC), topped up in the dashboard, plus stablecoin rails (USDC via x402 / MPP on Ethereum and Base). Card & fiat rails: unverified — hinted at in their docs but never specified. Not offered / not documented. No certificate issuance appears in their docs; the product is DNS + DNSSEC + ENS. Full CRUD plus batch, 17 record types, DNSSEC, nameservers, auto-renew, and ENS integration. Registration is async with order polling. MCP only, and it is their preferred interface. Streamable HTTP at api.namefi.io/mcp, discoverable via /.well-known/mcp/servers.json. No CLI found. domains are minted as NFTs
Cloudflare Registrarcloudflare.com At cost, with no markup — "you pay the registry and ICANN list price with no markup." Exact .com figure: unverified — the pricing page Cloudflare's own FAQ points to sits behind a JS challenge and could not be loaded, and we will not print a third-party number as if it were theirs. Cloudflare account with a verified email address. ICANN registrant-email verification after registering or the domain goes on hold. For API use: an API token plus a billing profile with a valid default payment method. No document KYC documented. Cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, UnionPay), PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, and instant bank payments. No crypto. Free SSL included, along with free DNS, CDN, WHOIS redaction and one-click DNSSEC. Full CRUD via the Cloudflare API v4, the most battle-tested DNS API here. Caveat: "all domains on Cloudflare Registrar use Cloudflare nameservers" — third-party nameservers are not permitted. Official MCP at mcp.cloudflare.com (OAuth), and the Registrar API is reachable through it as part of the general Cloudflare API surface. Registration API is in beta since 2026-04-15: renewals, transfers and contact updates are not yet available through the API. No registrar CLI found.
Name.comname.com · name.dev Their pricing page showed .com as €11.46 / €15.87 for us, but it geo-detected EUR and could not be forced to USD, and it never labels which figure is registration and which is renewal. USD price and the register/renew split: unverified. A reseller account with HTTP Basic auth — a shared, company-wide username rather than an email login. Separate sandbox and production tokens. No document KYC documented. Pre-funded account credit only, topped up by wire transfer or ACH (US only). Default purchase limit $2,500. A credit card is not listed as an API funding method — the least agent-friendly payment story here. Not included with a bare registration, and there are no SSL or certificate endpoints anywhere in the Core API. SSL is a separate paid product. Bundling with hosting plans: unverified. Full CRUD on records, DNSSEC, nameservers and URL forwarding. Official SDKs for TypeScript, Go and PHP. Note updates are a full overwrite, not a patch. Two official MCP servers: npx namecom-mcp / hosted at mcp.name.com, plus a read-only docs server. npm shows the package at v1.1.0 last published 2025-10-03. A CLI exists but is a third-party personal project (patramsey/namecom-cli, 3 stars), not an official one.

← scroll the table sideways for all six columns →

Sources: AgentDomains, agentdomain.app, DomainForAgents, Namefi, Cloudflare Registrar, Name.com — public pricing and documentation pages, plus live API calls to each provider, verified 23 August 2026.

The other question

Everything above sells you a second-level domain. But most agents asking "where do I put the thing I just built" are not offered a registrar at all — they are offered vercel.app, netlify.app or github.io. Those are free subdomains too, so they belong on this page. They answer a different question, and the difference is worth stating plainly.

What the hosting platforms give you that we do not. Vercel, Netlify and GitHub Pages host your site. We do not host anything — we give you a hostname and you point it wherever your thing already runs. If you have nothing running yet and you want a static site online in one command, deploy to one of them; that is what they are for. The table below is about what happens when the thing you built does not live on their platform.
Free subdomain Can it point at a server you run? Needs a deploy on their platform? DNS records you can write ACME DNS-01 for your own certs CLI / MCP
AgentDomains*.makes.fyi
*.agentdomains.co		 Yes — anywhere. A/AAAA at any IP, CNAME at any hostname. A VPS, a Railway app, a Pi on your desk, someone else's platform. No. We host nothing. The name is the whole product, which is why it can point at anything. A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, added and deleted one at a time over the HTTP API. Nameserver delegation if you would rather run the zone yourself. Yes. TXT records are writable, so an agent can complete a DNS-01 challenge for a cert on its own name. edge HTTPS included Go CLI (agentdomains claim), stdio MCP (npx agentdomains-mcp) and a hosted MCP at mcp.agentdomains.co — 19 tools.
Vercel*.vercel.app No. The URL is generated from a deployment (<project>-<scope>.vercel.app) and serves that deployment. There is no way to aim it elsewhere. Yes. No deployment, no hostname. none — the name has no zone of yours under it. A live check for a TXT record beneath a .vercel.app name returns nothing. No. Vercel provisions the certificate for its own deployment. vercel CLI — but it deploys projects, it does not hand you a hostname you can take away.
Netlify*.netlify.app No. The subdomain is your Netlify site's name and serves that site. Renaming the site renames the URL; it does not repoint it. Yes. The subdomain exists because the site does. none — Netlify DNS manages domains you bring to it, not the netlify.app name itself. No. netlify CLI — again a deploy tool, not a naming one.
GitHub Pages<owner>.github.io No. It serves HTML, CSS and JavaScript straight from a repository named <owner>.github.io. Static files only — no origin, no API behind it. Yes, and only one such site per account. 1 per account none — custom domains point at Pages; Pages does not point at you. No. gh pushes the repo. Nothing claims a name.
DuckDNS*.duckdns.org Yes, by IP. You supply any IPv4 or IPv6 and the name resolves there. This is the closest thing on the page to what we do. No. It is a naming service, like us. A, AAAA and TXT over a token URL — but no CNAME. So it cannot point at a platform hostname like yourapp.up.railway.app, which is how most managed origins are addressed. Yes. The TXT API is documented for proving ownership to Let's Encrypt. No official CLI or MCP server; the update endpoint is a URL any script can call.
nip.io<ip>.nip.io
and sslip.io		 Yes, by IP only. The hostname encodes the address: 10-0-0-1.nip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1. We checked — it does. No, but there is nothing to register either. none — the answer is computed from the name, so there are no records to write and no name that is yours. Anyone can use the name for your IP. No. No TXT means no DNS-01, so certificates have to come from HTTP-01 against the same IP. Nothing to drive. It is a resolver trick, not a service.

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Sources: Vercel generated URLs, Netlify domains, GitHub Pages, DuckDNS API spec, nip.io — provider documentation, plus live dig queries against nip.io and a .vercel.app name, verified 3 September 2026.

What we left blank

Blank cells are the point of this page, not a gap in it. Each one below is something we tried to verify on 2026-08-23 and could not, so we printed nothing rather than something plausible:

We also corrected three things we had believed going in: Cloudflare Registrar does now have a public registration API (beta, announced 2026-04-15), agentdomain.app does document its pricing (on the homepage, not /pricing), and DomainForAgents lives at domainforagents.io — domainforagents.com is unregistered.

So which one?

Throwaway agent output

A demo, a preview, a webhook receiver, a site an agent generated ten minutes ago. Use us. It is free and instant, and if it turns out to matter you can move it later.

A static site and nothing else

Plain HTML with no server behind it and no origin of your own. Vercel, Netlify or GitHub Pages — they host it and name it in one step, which we cannot do because we host nothing.

Something already running somewhere

A VPS, a Railway app, a container, a Pi. Use us. A *.vercel.app or *.netlify.app name cannot be aimed at it; a makes.fyi name is a real hostname with A, AAAA, CNAME and TXT records you write.

Home IP, no CNAME needed

A box on a dynamic address with nothing in front of it. DuckDNS is a genuinely good fit and has been doing it for years. Come to us when you need a CNAME, a reverse proxy, or an agent-driven CLI and MCP.

A name you must own

Anything with a future, a brand, or an email address on it. Cloudflare Registrar if you have a card — at-cost pricing and the most reliable DNS API in the list.

Agent pays, no human

A real domain bought autonomously with no card and no signup. agentdomain.app or DomainForAgents — both take stablecoins over x402 and skip accounts entirely.

At volume, as a reseller

Hundreds of names under one balance. Name.com, if pre-funding by wire and running a reseller account is something you are set up to do.

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