dotsweep — an agent skill for checking domain name availability and prices

Teaches an AI agent to check whether a domain name is free across 1,200+ extensions — with the renewal price, the registry's minimum term, and who is allowed to register it. No API key, no account, nothing to install beyond this file.

It never reports an unreachable registry as available. That is the point. A raw whois returns text for a throttled or rate-limited registry that reads like a not-found, so an agent rolling its own check reports a taken domain as free — the one wrong answer that costs someone money.

Install

Paste this into any agent that can write files:

Add a skill called dotsweep, for checking domain availability. Fetch https://dotsweep.com/skill.md and save it verbatim as dotsweep/SKILL.md inside whichever skills directory you read.

Or from this repo:

npx skills add stanmaygo/dotsweep

Or link it into any harness that loads skill instructions:

ln -s "$PWD/skills/dotsweep" <your-skills-dir>/dotsweep

Or as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add stanmaygo/dotsweep
/plugin install dotsweep@dotsweep

Nothing here is Claude-specific. The runtime artifact is skills/dotsweep/SKILL.md — portable Markdown with portable frontmatter. agents/openai.yaml supplies the Codex display surface; .claude-plugin/ is optional extra packaging for one harness, not a dependency of the skill.

What the agent gets

curl -s -X POST https://dotsweep.com/check \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"domains":["acmeforge.com","acmeforge.io","acmeforge.ai"]}'

{ "domain": "acmeforge.io", "status": "available", "confidence": "certain",
  "source": "rdap",
  "price": { "currency": "USD", "registration": 28.12, "renewal": 51.80 } }

• status — available, taken or unknown
• confidence — certain (a registry answered) or estimated (DNS only). estimated is never a green light; an unreachable registry cannot produce a confident "available".
• price — first year and renewal, because the renewal is the number paid every year after the first and is the one most tools hide.
• policy — minimum term (.ai sells two years at a time), eligibility rules, and extensions that sell to nobody at all.

Why a skill and not just whois

| | this skill | whois | |---|---|---| | Distinguishes refused from not found | yes | no | | Works for .dev / .app | yes | no server exists | | One host for every extension | yes | different per TLD | | Renewal price | yes | no price at all | | Registry minimum term | yes | no | | Eligibility rules | yes | no |

There is also an MCP server

Same engine, same data, for clients that take a URL rather than a file — which includes the phone apps, where nothing can be installed:

https://dotsweep.com/mcp

Tools: check_domains, whois, list_tlds. Setup click-path at dotsweep.com/setup.

And a GitHub Action

For the cases with no agent in the loop — watching a name you want until it drops, or checking a list of candidates on a schedule.

- uses: stanmaygo/dotsweep@v1
  id: names
  with:
    domains: acme brandnew
    tlds: com io ai dev
- run: echo "free: ${{ steps.names.outputs.available }}"

Outputs are available, taken, closed, unconfirmed, a -count for each, and results with the full JSON. It writes a table to the job summary.

The four buckets are the whole point, and three of them are not available. A rate-limited registry lands in unconfirmed, never in available — and if the API cannot be reached at all the step fails rather than answering, because a missing name reads exactly like a free one. closed is separate because a .brand TLD answers with a genuine not-found: shoes.nike is unregistered and unbuyable at once, so counting it as available would be true and useless.

Watch a name and get told the day it frees up. Put this in a repo you already commit to, not a fresh one: GitHub disables a scheduled workflow after 60 days without a new commit in a public repo, and a release, tag, issue or PR does not reset that clock. The failure is silent, which on a watch that runs for months is the whole point lost.

on:
  schedule: [{ cron: '0 9 * * *' }]
jobs:
  watch:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: stanmaygo/dotsweep@v1
        with:
          domains: the-one-i-want.com
          fail-if-available: true

Endpoint

The skill calls https://dotsweep.com by default and honours DOTSWEEP_API for anyone running their own instance. Reference: dotsweep.com/docs and /llms.txt.

Limits worth knowing

• Premium and reserved names return the same registry answer as an ordinary free domain. Every quoted price is a floor, not a quote.
• Prices are one registrar's per row, and each row says which.
• A TLD with no eligibility entry has not been checked — that is not the same as having no requirements.

License

MIT