RDAP-native domain intelligence
DropPerch reads the authoritative registry for every domain you watch and follows it through hold, redemption and pending delete — then tells you once, at the moment it can actually be bought.
The window most people miss
Between the expiry date and the moment a name is actually released, a registry moves it through four defined states over roughly eighty days. Watching the expiry date alone means you find out after someone else already did.
ok
Registered
until expiry
Resolving normally. We poll weekly and tighten as expiry nears.
autoRenewPeriod
Auto-renew grace
0–45 days
Expired, but the owner can still renew at the ordinary price.
redemptionPeriod
Redemption
30 days
Deleted by the registrar. Recovery now costs a restore fee.
pendingDelete
Pending delete
5 days
Irreversible. The release time is now predictable to the hour.
RDAP 404
Released
registrable
The registry stops answering for it. This is the alert that matters.
How it works
STEP 01
Its extension is resolved through the IANA bootstrap and the registry is queried on the spot. An extension no registry answers for is refused as you add it, rather than saved as a row that could never update.
STEP 02
At 07:17 UTC every domain whose next check has come due is looked up again, five registries at a time. Names far from expiry are checked weekly; anything on hold, in redemption or pending delete is checked every 24 hours.
STEP 03
Each answer is compared against the state you were last actually emailed about — not against yesterday's reading. A failure between the write and the send retries on the next sweep instead of losing the alert for good.
STEP 04
Everything that moved that day arrives as a single digest, most urgent first, with a registration link on anything already released. Nothing moved means nothing lands in your inbox.
Where the answers come from
01
Every lookup resolves through the IANA bootstrap to the registry that actually owns the name — Verisign for .com, Identity Digital, Nominet, CentralNic. No single endpoint pretending to know every extension.
02
Forty domains entering redemption on the same morning produce one digest, ordered by urgency. A domain that escalates from hold to pending delete alerts again. Nothing sends twice.
03
Each watched name carries its authority score and referring-domain count, so you know whether a drop is worth chasing before the backorder queue opens.
Where DropPerch sits
Research suites sell a searchable index of everything expiring anywhere, priced for people buying hundreds of names a month. Site monitors watch domains you already own, next to uptime and SSL. Neither one follows a name you have picked through the eighty days between expiry and release. That is the only thing DropPerch does.
| Registrar email | Research suites | Site monitors | DropPerch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Renewing your own | Searching every drop | Uptime, SSL, expiry | Names you picked |
| Source of truth | One registrar | Cached index | Registrar or WHOIS | The registry, live |
| Domains you don't own | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Tracks hold, redemption, pendingDelete | No | No | No | Yes |
| Tells you the release date | No | No | No | Yes |
| TLD coverage | That registrar's | Varies | Varies | 1,500+ via IANA |
| Repeats the same alert | Often | — | Often | Never |
| Typical price | Included | $68–118 / mo | $6–60 / mo | $0–5 / mo |
Competitor prices: DomCop and Watchman Tower list rates, September 2026. Compared by category, not feature for feature.
Vocabulary
RDAP returns these as lowercase phrases. We normalise, store the verbatim original, and translate the ones that change what you should do.
Who watches domains
Track a shortlist through the drop and get the alert with an authority score and referring-domain count already attached, so the decision to chase a name is made before the backorder queue opens rather than after.
One watchlist covering every client domain, whichever registrar each was bought at. Renewal risk stops depending on whether a notice reached the right person at the right client.
API, auth and mail domains expire exactly the way the marketing site does. A registrar notice sent to a departed colleague's inbox is not a monitoring strategy, and the outage it causes is not a marketing problem.
1,500+
TLDs resolvable
80
Days expiry to release
5
Days in pendingDelete
24h
Sweep at drop stage
Pricing
DropPerch does not need to cover a crawler over every domain on earth, so it is not priced as though it did. Start free and stay free if twenty-five names is your whole watchlist.
Watchlist
$0 / forever
Portfolio
$5 / month, or $48 a year
No card to start, on either plan. For comparison, expired-domain research suites list from $68 a month and general site monitors from $5.99.
Questions
No. It tells you the moment a name is registrable and links straight to a registrar. A contested drop is won by backorder services bidding in the same second the registry releases it; DropPerch makes sure you know the window exists.
RDAP is ICANN's replacement for WHOIS, specified in RFC 9083. It returns structured JSON with explicit status codes, so a state like redemptionPeriod is machine-readable instead of being parsed out of free text that differs at every registrar.
Any TLD in the IANA bootstrap registry that publishes an RDAP endpoint, which is more than 1,500 today. The extension is checked against the bootstrap and then actually looked up when you add a domain, so support is verified rather than assumed from a list.
Some publish none at all — Nominet's .co.uk gives status but no expiration event. Those names are tracked by their status transitions instead. Expiry is treated as optional throughout rather than assumed to exist.
Every 24 hours once it is expiring, on hold, in redemption or pending delete, and weekly while it is far from expiry. The sweep runs at 07:17 UTC, deliberately off the hour because scheduled jobs are delayed most at the top of one.
No. DropPerch records the state it last emailed you about for each domain and compares against that. A real escalation from hold to pending delete alerts again; the same state never does.
Yes. Registry records are public, read-only data, so watching a name needs no relationship with it and no permission from whoever holds it.
Whichever you choose. Hold, redemption, pending delete and release are independent switches, so an investor watching for the drop and an agency watching for renewal risk can each hear only about the states they act on.
Contact
DropPerch is small enough that the person answering your email is the person who wrote the poller. If a domain reports something that looks wrong, that is worth knowing about — registries differ in ways no amount of testing catches on its own.
For a domain that looks wrong, include the name and roughly when you saw it. Every record keeps the status strings verbatim as the registry phrased them, so what you were shown can be checked against what the registry actually said.
Use the contact formAdd a domain and the next sweep picks it up. You get one email when its state changes, and nothing at all when it does not.
Domain lifecycle monitoring, read from the authoritative registry rather than a cached copy of it.