How agents get a
hostname.
Six 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.
$0 — here's why. Our row costs nothing because a subdomain of a domain we already operate has no registry fee behind it. There is no paid tier waiting, and no card in the flow. What that 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, ever.
|
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. No card, no wallet, no balance to top up. | 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.
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:
- Cloudflare's exact
.comprice. Their "at cost, no markup" wording is verifiable; the page their FAQ links for actual figures is behind a JS challenge. Third-party price trackers list a number — that is not Cloudflare saying it. - Name.com in USD, and whether the two figures on their pricing page are register-and-renew or something else. The page never labels them.
- Namefi's KYC policy and card/fiat rails. Neither appears on any page we loaded.
- SSL for Namefi and DomainForAgents. We searched their full API references and found no certificate endpoints. That strongly suggests "not offered", but a documentation absence is not a statement, so it stays blank.
- Every DomainForAgents TLD except
.com. They publish no price table; the $15.52 came from an actual search result.
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 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.