.software

Register a .software domain

Held by Dog Beach, LLC, not by Binky Moon: .software came from the Rightside portfolio and moved to Dog Beach in 2021. It is unrestricted, with no developer or company check of any kind.

Extension type: Generic (gTLD)
Who can register: Open to anyone
Registry: Dog Beach
Renews at: CHF 35.10 / year

Check a .software name

.software pricing

.software prices by registration term
Term	1 year	2 years	3 years	4 years	5 years
Registration For a name nobody currently holds.	CHF 24.10	CHF 71.45	CHF 107.15	CHF 142.85	CHF 178.55
Renewal Every term after that. This is the number that matters most, so it sits on the same screen as the first one.	CHF 35.10	CHF 70.25	CHF 105.35	CHF 140.45	CHF 175.55
Transfer in Moving an existing name to us. Adds a year to the term rather than restarting it.	CHF 35.10one-off	Not offered	Not offered	Not offered	Not offered
Restore Recovering a name after it lapsed into redemption. Shown deliberately: it is the expensive one.	CHF 49.15one-off	Not offered	Not offered	Not offered	Not offered

Each figure is the total for that whole term, resolved live from the same pricing engine that charges your cart, so this page cannot advertise an amount checkout will not honour. Only the terms this registry actually sells are shown; an em-dash means that term is not on offer. A crossed-out price is a standing price a running promotion undercuts. Premium names are priced individually — search the exact name to see its own quote.

Before you register .software

What the price includes: Every .software amount on this page is resolved by the same pricing engine that charges your cart, at the moment the page is built. There is no separate ICANN fee, agency fee or surcharge added later — the figure you see is the figure you pay, in the currency shown.
Premium and reserved names: Some names are classed as premium by the registry and priced individually, usually at the premium rate every year rather than only the first. Search the exact name to see its own quote. If a name's premium status or price changes between your quote and your purchase, the quote is invalidated rather than quietly repriced.
Renewal is not automatic unless you switch it on: Auto-renew is off unless you enable it, and enabling it sets a flag at the registry rather than scheduling a charge here. We email the registrant address before a name expires, so keep a monitored address on the record. If a .software name does lapse, restoring it costs considerably more than renewing it would have — the restore price is in the table above.
Transfers: Transferring .software to us needs the AuthInfo (EPP) code from your current registrar, which they are obliged to give you on request. Where the registry operates a waiting period before a name may move — ICANN imposes one on generic extensions — it is set out in the facts above. That is registry policy, not ours, and we cannot waive it.

Eligibility

Open to anyone, anywhere

Registry: Dog Beach, LLC, part of Identity Digital.

No eligibility test. You do not need to publish software, hold a company, or demonstrate a technical purpose, and registration completes immediately when a name is free.
Standard gTLD registrant data only. No trustee service, no local presence, no additional fields to collect, which suits distributed teams with no single legal home.
Internationalised labels are accepted under IDNA 2008, with the supported character set fixed per TLD and scripts not mixable inside one label.
Identity Digital reserves names for operations and premium allocation and can change that set at any time, so a short or generic label may be withheld or priced above the standard rate.

Where .software wins and where it does not

The argument for .software is character economy plus category. Software companies almost always end up with a compromise .com, the product name with get, try, use or app bolted on, and every one of those adds friction to a name that has to be typed, dictated in a support call and printed in documentation. Moving the category to the right of the dot recovers the clean product word and keeps the meaning, which is the same trade a lot of teams already make with .io or .app.

It is a poor fit in two specific situations, and it is worth being direct about both. The first is enterprise sales, where procurement and security reviewers still treat a .com as a proxy for permanence, and a non-.com address costs you explaining time you would rather spend elsewhere. The second is developer-facing tooling, where .dev has become the convention and carries an actual technical property that .software does not. If the audience is engineers who will paste your domain into a terminal, .dev is the more natural choice.

The registry history, and why it matters

IANA delegated .software in May 2014 to United TLD Holdco, part of Rightside, and records the current sponsoring organisation as Dog Beach, LLC following a transfer completed in June 2021. Dog Beach is one of the entities Identity Digital contracts through, which is why .software sits under the same operational policies as the rest of the portfolio, an acceptable use policy, an IDN policy, a reserved names policy, but it is a different contracting entity from Binky Moon, which holds extensions such as .agency and .farm. If you are checking a registry agreement or filing a complaint, that distinction is the one that matters.

Operationally the extension behaves like any ICANN-contracted gTLD, and we register it as an approved Openprovider reseller with no extra data collection. The one thing we would flag for a software business specifically is dependency risk. A domain that appears in package registries, update endpoints, licence checks or CI configuration is infrastructure, not marketing, and losing it to an unread renewal notice is a supply-chain incident rather than a downtime incident. Put the registrant contact on a monitored team address rather than an individual's, keep the registrar lock on, and consider a longer term.

Terms and lifecycle

What holding a .software actually commits you to

Term: One to ten years per registration. For a name that will appear in installation instructions, package manifests and documentation for years, buying a longer term removes one recurring way to lose it.
If you miss the renewal: Up to 45 days in the registry auto-renew grace period, and through Openprovider we can renew at the ordinary price for 40 days after expiry. After deletion, ICANN's 30-day redemption period switches off DNS and blocks transfers out entirely, so a restore is the only route back and it costs far more than a renewal. Identity Digital then holds the name a further 5 days before it is released.
Transfer lock: 60 days after registration and 60 days after any previous transfer, under ICANN's Transfer Policy. Transfers use the AuthInfo code, which your losing registrar must supply within 5 calendar days of your request, and the registrar lock has to be lifted first.
HTTPS and DNSSEC: Unlike .dev, .software is not on the HSTS preload list, so browsers do not force HTTPS on it and a plain HTTP host will load. That is a genuine difference: on .software the TLS configuration is entirely your responsibility. DNSSEC signing is available and worth enabling for anything serving downloads.
Name length and characters: Labels use letters, digits and hyphens up to 63 characters. The practical constraint is not the limit but the total: acme.software is fourteen characters before the path, which is long in a curl command or a package URL, so test how it reads in your own docs.

Fit

Who .software is for

Named products with a taken .com
The usual pattern is a product word that went years ago as a .com. Putting the product on the left and .software on the right gives a shorter, more legible address than getproduct.com or productapp.com, and it states the category without an extra word.
Vendors separating product from company
Consultancies and agencies that also ship a product often want the product to have its own identity without a new corporate brand. A .software name gives the product a home that reads as a product, while the company keeps its existing domain.
When .dev or .com is the better call
For developer tooling, documentation and anything where enforced HTTPS is an advantage, .dev is the stronger buy. If you are raising money or selling to enterprise procurement, take the .com: buyers at that end still read a non-.com address as a signal about the size of the company, fairly or not.

Building for developers?

If the audience is engineers rather than buyers, .dev is usually the better address, and it enforces HTTPS at the browser rather than leaving it to your configuration. The registry and the rules are different.

See .dev domains

Frequently asked questions

Who is the registry operator for .software?

Dog Beach, LLC, which contracts through Identity Digital. IANA shows the extension delegated to United TLD Holdco in May 2014 and transferred to Dog Beach in June 2021. It is not held by Binky Moon, the entity behind several other Identity Digital extensions.

Are there any restrictions on registering .software?

None. There is no requirement to publish software, hold a company registration or show a technical purpose, and no validation step, so registration is immediate once a name is available. The only practical limits are the registry's reserved and premium name sets.

Is .software HTTPS-only like .dev?

No. .dev is on the HSTS preload list, so browsers refuse plain HTTP on it. .software is not, so an unencrypted host will still load. You should serve it over HTTPS regardless, but the enforcement is yours to configure rather than the extension's.

What happens if a .software domain expires?

It enters the registry auto-renew grace period, where we can still renew it at the ordinary price for 40 days after expiry. Once deleted, ICANN's 30-day redemption period applies: DNS is off, transfers out are blocked, and recovery means paying the restore price. Five further days of pending delete follow before release.

Can I move a .software domain to you from another registrar?

Yes, provided it was not registered or transferred in the last 60 days, since ICANN's Transfer Policy locks gTLDs for 60 days after each. Ask your current registrar to unlock the domain and issue the AuthInfo code, which they must do within 5 calendar days, then start the transfer here.