Best TLDs for SaaS Startups (Ranked)

The best TLD for a SaaS startup is still .com. Two in three SaaS companies use one, and the bigger a SaaS company gets, the more likely it is to be on .com. But new startups have stopped waiting for it. In our database, more SaaS companies founded since 2023 picked .ai than .com, and .dev and .so have grown faster than any other extension.

We checked the website domains of 25,970 SaaS and AI companies in the LeadWave database to rank the best domain extensions for a SaaS company: what real companies use, how that changed by founding year, what each TLD costs to renew, and what can go wrong with it. Prices and policies are from the registries and registrars, as of October 31, 2026.

The best TLDs for SaaS, ranked: the short answer

1. .com: the best domain for a SaaS company if you can get the exact name, or the name with a prefix such as get- or try-.

2. .ai: the best TLD for an AI product. 43% of the AI startups founded since 2023 in our data use it. It costs about $80 a year, paid two years at a time.

3. .io: still fine for developer tools and B2B infrastructure, but new startups have left it: 3% of those founded since 2024.

4. .co: short and well known, but people type .com by habit.

5. .app: Google-run, HTTPS-only, good for product-led and mobile apps (Linear, Gamma).

6. .dev: Google-run, HTTPS-only, the fastest-growing TLD among new developer tools (Lovable, Warp, Zed).

7. Your country's TLD (.de, .co.uk, .com.br): the right pick if you only sell in one country.

8. .so, .sh and .inc: short names and a certain status, with real trade-offs in price and SEO.

Skip .xyz, .biz, .info, .online and .site for a B2B product. The details, prices and data for each are below.

Which TLDs SaaS companies actually use

The 25,970 companies use 266 different extensions, but four of them cover 84% of the companies: .com (67.5%), .io (7.9%), .ai (5.7%) and .co (2.9%). Next come the country domains of France, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, each used mostly by companies from that country.

How the choice changed by founding year

Sort the same companies by the year they were founded and the story changes:

• .com went from almost everyone to about a third. 90% of the SaaS companies founded in 2000–2009 are on .com, 75% of those founded in 2014, 50% in 2020 and 32% in 2023.

• .io peaked in 2022, then collapsed. It grew steadily to 23% of the companies founded in 2022, then fell to 8% in 2023 and 3% in 2024–26.

• .ai took over. Under 1% of the companies founded in 2010, 11% in 2020, 20% in 2022, then 37% in 2023 and 41% in 2024–26: ahead of .com in both years.

Two things to keep in mind. First, most companies founded since 2023 in our data are AI companies (281 of 321), which flatters .ai. Y Combinator's full directory shows a smaller swing: in FundingWatcher's analysis of 5,962 YC companies, .com was 47.5% of the Summer 2026 batch and .ai 26.7%, down from a peak of 37.0% in Summer 2025. Second, these are the domains companies use today. Many older companies started on another TLD and bought the .com later, so the early years look more .com-heavy than they were at launch.

The best TLDs for SaaS startups, ranked

We ranked each TLD on six things: how many SaaS companies use it, whether new startups are moving to it or away from it, how much buyers trust it, what it really costs once you renew, how much policy or registry risk it carries, and how Google treats it.

Renewal prices are Porkbun's list prices on October 31, 2026, and the .so price is Namecheap's, which is typical. First-year prices are often lower, which is why we list the renewal.

1. .com: the best TLD for SaaS, if you can get it

17,530 of the 25,970 companies use .com, and it's the default for established software: 93% of SaaS companies with more than 1,000 employees and 86% of those that raised $100–500 million are on .com. Buyers type it without thinking, emails don't get misdirected to it by accident, and nobody in a procurement review asks about it.

The domain itself is cheap. Verisign's wholesale price is $10.97 from November 1, 2026, up 7%, and its contract allows up to three more 7% increases in the current six-year cycle (Domain Name Wire). The exact name you want is a different story: it's almost always taken, and buying it can cost from thousands of dollars to six figures (see the upgrade stories below).

The usual workaround is a prefix or suffix on the .com. In our data, 84% of the domains with a prefix like get-, try- or use- are .com: getguru.com, usemotion.com, gopigment.com. Exact-name domains are 76% of .com domains, against 89% of .io domains, because founders who settle for an alternative TLD usually get their exact name there.

2. .ai: the best TLD for an AI product

.ai is only 5.7% of all SaaS companies but 30.1% of those founded since 2022, six times its share among older companies. Among AI companies founded since 2023, 43% use it. It's also the TLD of the frontier: xAI (x.ai), Mistral (mistral.ai), Harvey (harvey.ai), Perplexity and Jasper all use it, and the 44 companies in our data that raised over $1 billion are 15.9% on .ai, against 4.0% of those that raised $100–500 million.

It's the most expensive of the common TLDs. The registry raised the wholesale price from $70 to $80 a year in March 2026, and every registration, renewal and transfer is for at least two years (Domain Name Wire), so expect about $165 every second year. Good short names cost far more: bot.ai sold for $1.2 million in February 2026, the largest public .ai sale so far (DN Journal).

.ai is Anguilla's country code. The island's government runs it with Identity Digital, which took over the registry in a five-year deal (Domain Name Wire), and the domain passed 1 million registrations in January 2026 (Domain Name Wire). It brought Anguilla EC$230.5 million (US$85.3 million) in 2025 (Anguilla Focus), which gives the government every reason to keep it stable. Google treats .ai as a generic TLD, not as a signal that you target Anguilla.

The catch: if your product isn't AI, .ai ties your brand to a trend and costs about seven times as much as a .com.

3. .io: still fine for developer tools, but new startups have left

.io was the startup TLD of the 2010s. It's 7.9% of all SaaS companies, and it grew to 23% of the companies founded in 2022. Then it fell to 8% in 2023 and 3% in 2024–26, as AI startups moved to .ai. Well-known users include Gong (gong.io), Snyk (snyk.io), Apollo.io, Pendo and ElevenLabs, which owns elevenlabs.com but sends it to elevenlabs.io.

It costs about $52 a year to renew, and the wholesale price rises from $50 to $56 on January 19, 2027 (Domain Name Wire). The bigger question is its future. .io is the code of the British Indian Ocean Territory, the Chagos Islands, which the UK agreed to hand to Mauritius in a treaty signed in May 2025. The treaty isn't in force: it stalled in April 2026 when the US withheld the consent it requires (Domain Incite, Al Jazeera). Even if the territory's code were withdrawn one day, IANA's rules give a ccTLD five years before it's removed, and up to ten with an extension (IANA), and ICANN has said the outcome for .io is not a foregone conclusion (ICANN). It's a risk to know about, not a reason to panic.

4. .co: short and familiar, with a typo problem

.co is 2.9% of SaaS companies and around 4–6% of every founding year since 2015. Hugging Face (huggingface.co), Elastic (elastic.co), MURAL (mural.co) and Affinity (affinity.co) use it. It renews for about $31 a year. It's Colombia's code, open to anyone worldwide, and its registry moved to a new operator in October 2025 (Domain Incite). Google treats it as generic. The downside is the missing m: people type .com from habit, and some of your email will go to whoever owns the .com.

5. .app: for product-led and mobile apps

.app is run by Google Registry, renews for about $15 a year, and is on the HSTS preload list, so every .app site must use HTTPS (Google Registry). It's 0.7% of all SaaS companies and 3.5% of those founded since 2022. Linear (linear.app) is the best-known example: linear.com belongs to Analog Devices. Gamma (gamma.app) and folk (folk.app) use it too, and Vercel moved its v0 product from v0.dev to v0.app in August 2025 when it opened it to non-developers (SiliconANGLE).

6. .dev: the fastest-growing TLD among developer tools

.dev is also Google's and also HTTPS-only (Google Registry). It's only 0.3% of all SaaS companies, but its share grew 18-fold: from 0.2% of companies founded before 2022 to 3.7% of those founded since. Lovable (lovable.dev, which also owns lovable.com and redirects it), Warp (warp.dev), Zed (zed.dev) and Merge (merge.dev) use it. It renews for about $13. It says "for developers", which is a strength for a dev tool and a limit if you later sell to non-technical buyers.

7. Your country's TLD: for SaaS that sells in one market

Most SaaS companies sell across borders, so most skip their country code: only 6.7% of UK SaaS companies use .co.uk or .uk, and 0.5% of US ones use .us. Brazil is the exception, with 51% of Brazilian SaaS companies on .com.br, followed by Australia (13%) and Germany (12%).

A country TLD makes sense when your buyers, invoices and support are in one country. Germans know their own: in a December 2025 survey, 79% of Germans recognised .de unprompted, against 67% for .com, and .de passed 18 million names in July 2026 (Domain Name Wire). Country TLDs are cheap ($4–10 a year), and Google uses them as a signal that you target that country. Register the .com too if you can, or at least redirect it, in case you expand. Note that .eu is only open to people and organisations in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway (EURid).

8. .so, .sh and .inc: short names at a price

These three buy you a short, exact name. Each has a catch.

• .so (Somalia) grew from 0.2% of SaaS companies founded before 2022 to 3.5% of those founded since. Notion launched on notion.so and moved to notion.com in June 2026 after years of trying to buy it (createwith). Circle (circle.so) and Plane (plane.so) still use it. It costs about $65–70 a year, and it isn't on Google's list of country codes treated as generic, so Google assumes by default that a .so site targets Somalia (Google Search Central).

• .sh (St Helena) is popular with command-line and developer tools: Polar (polar.sh) and Platform.sh. It's run by the same company as .io (IANA), costs about $47 a year, and is also missing from Google's generic list. Bun has since moved from bun.sh to bun.com.

• .inc costs about $2,000 a year, on purpose: its registry prices it "for real businesses, not speculators" (get.inc). That buys rare short names: Safe Superintelligence is ssi.inc and Standard Intelligence is si.inc.

Rising stars: the TLDs gaining ground

Compare the 569 companies founded since 2022 with the 13,724 founded before, and four TLDs stand out: .dev (18.5 times its old share), .so (17.5 times), .ai (6.3 times) and .app (4.4 times). .com fell from 70% to 32%. Smaller TLDs are appearing too, a few companies at a time: .inc (ssi.inc), .sh (polar.sh, cosine.sh), .computer (zo.computer) and .new (bolt.new).

.si: the "super intelligence" domain rush

Slovenia's .si is the newest rising star, and the least proven. On September 29, 2026, a US executive order told federal agencies to say "super intelligence" and "SI" instead of "AI". Registry SI reported a 2,199% rise in .si registrations in September, about 11,000 new .si domains on September 30 and 13,603 on October 1 (TechCrunch, The Next Web). A .si domain costs about $12 a year at Hostinger, against about $90 for a .ai, which also needs two years upfront. The rush continued into October (Euronews).

Treat it with care. The registry said the order wasn't the only cause, and Hostinger found only about 3% of its new .si domains were explicitly AI-related: much of the buying looks like speculation. None of the 25,970 companies in our data uses .si yet. Google treats .si as Slovenian, so a .si site starts with a country signal you probably don't want. Registering your name on .si to protect it is cheap; building your brand on it is a bet.

New TLDs from ICANN's 2026 round

ICANN's first new-TLD round since 2012 closed in August 2026 with 1,615 applications, 333 of them for brand TLDs like a company's own name (ICANN). None of them will be live for a while, and an application costs $227,000, so this matters to large brands, not to a startup picking its first domain.

Why bigger SaaS companies are on .com

The share of SaaS companies on .com rises with every size band: 59% of companies with 1–10 employees, 77% of those with 51–200, and 93% of those with more than 1,000. The same pattern holds for funding: 63% of companies that raised under $1 million are on .com, against 86% of those that raised $100–500 million. .io goes the other way, from 13% of the smallest companies to under 1% of the largest.

Part of that is age: bigger companies are older, from the years when everyone used .com. The rest is the upgrade path. Startups launch on whatever they can get and buy the .com once they can afford it:

Read more about two of them in our Cursor and Notion company profiles.

The opposite also happens. Once a brand is known by its alternative TLD, the .com becomes a redirect: Perplexity sends perplexity.com to perplexity.ai, Hugging Face sends huggingface.com to huggingface.co, and Lovable sends lovable.com to lovable.dev. Some never get the choice: Linear is on linear.app because linear.com belongs to Analog Devices.

.ai and AI startups

Among the companies we classify as AI companies, 12.1% use .ai, against 1.2% of the rest. The share climbs with every cohort: 1.7% of AI companies founded before 2015, 11% of those founded in 2015–19, 26% of the 2022 class and 43% of those founded since 2023. For a new AI product, .ai is now the norm, not a compromise.

Two cautions. The price is real: at about $80 a year, a .ai costs about seven times as much as a .com, every year. And the trend may have peaked: in Y Combinator's batches, .ai fell from 37.0% in Summer 2025 to 26.7% in Summer 2026 (FundingWatcher).

What to do when the .com is taken

Founders have three ways around a taken .com, and the data shows all three:

• Add a word. get- is by far the most common prefix (getguru.com, getcensus.com), followed by go-, use- and try-; -app and -hq are the common suffixes. 84% of the prefixed domains are .com.

• Change the TLD. Keep the exact name on .ai, .io, .app or .dev. 89% of .io domains and 91% of .dev domains are the company's exact name.

• Pick a shorter, more unusual name. The median name length fell from 9 characters (companies founded before 2010) to 7 (founded since 2022), and a quarter of the companies founded since 2022 use five characters or fewer.

Our free SaaS domain name generator tries these patterns for your name on the TLDs SaaS companies actually use and shows which look free. If you don't have a name yet, start with the SaaS name generator.

Does your TLD affect SEO?

Not directly. Google has said since 2015 that it treats new TLDs like .com and .org, and that keywords in a TLD give no advantage or disadvantage in search (Google Search Central). Country codes are the exception: Google treats them as a sign that you target that country, unless the code is on its list of ones it treats as generic. That list includes .ai, .io, .co, .me and .tv, but not .so, .sh or .si (Google Search Central). What a TLD does change is the click: people trust and remember .com more, and that shows in click-through and in email typos.

TLDs to avoid for a B2B SaaS

• .xyz: the biggest new TLD, with over 11 million names, and a first year that can cost $2. That's the problem: cheap TLDs attract abuse. In Interisle's 2025 study, new TLDs held about five times more malicious registrations than their market share (Interisle). Only 0.1% of SaaS companies use .xyz.

• .biz and .info: old, but associated with spam. In a 2019 survey of 1,500 people, .biz scored 2.9 out of 5 for trust against 3.5 for .com (GrowthBadger).

• .online, .site and .club: cheap generic TLDs that read as low-effort to a business buyer.

• .tech and .cloud: not bad, but watch the renewal. .tech costs $7–10 in the first year and about $50 after.

How to choose a domain for your SaaS

1. Check the exact .com first, including what its owner wants for it. Set a budget before you ask.

2. If it's taken, decide between a longer .com and the exact name elsewhere. Selling to enterprises or non-technical buyers: a .com with get- or try-. An AI product: .ai. A developer tool: .dev or .io. A consumer or mobile app: .app.

3. Compare renewal prices, not first-year prices. .ai, .io, .tech and .inc all cost far more in year two than the offer suggests.

4. Check the risks. Country codes come with a government and a policy (.io, .so, .si); check how Google treats yours.

5. Register the obvious variants and redirect them: your .com if you can, your country TLD, and common misspellings. Plan for the .com upgrade if you grow.

FAQ

What is the best TLD for a SaaS startup?

.com, if you can get your name or a short variation of it: 67.5% of SaaS companies use it, and 93% of those with more than 1,000 employees. For an AI product, .ai is now as common as .com among new startups. For developer tools, .dev and .io are both accepted.

Is .io still good for SaaS?

Yes for developer tools, but it's losing ground: 23% of the SaaS companies founded in 2022 chose .io, and 3% of those founded since 2024. The Chagos handover that could affect it is frozen, and a retired country code would get at least five years' notice. It costs about $52 a year.

Should a SaaS that isn't AI use .ai?

Usually not. Only 1.2% of the non-AI companies in our data use .ai. It costs about $80 a year, paid two years at a time, and it ties your brand to AI.

Is .co a good alternative to .com?

It's acceptable and Google treats it as generic, but people often type .com instead, which sends traffic and emails to someone else. If you use .co, try to own the .com too.

Does the domain extension affect SEO?

Not directly: Google ranks .com, .io, .ai and new TLDs the same way. Country codes not on Google's generic list, such as .so, .sh and .si, tell Google you target that country.

Is .si a good domain for an AI startup?

Not yet. It's cheap (about $12 a year), but the September 2026 rush is mostly speculation, no SaaS company in our data uses it, and Google treats it as Slovenian. Registering your name there to protect it costs little.

Should I buy the .com later?

Many companies do: Loom, Supabase, Front, Clerk, Cursor, Railway and Notion all moved to the .com after launching elsewhere. Plan for it, and use one domain for email from day one, so moving later is a redirect rather than a rebuild.

What's the cheapest credible TLD for a startup?

.com (about $11 a year) if your name is free there, then .dev and .app (about $13–15). Country codes like .de and .co.uk cost under $10.

Methodology

The data is the LeadWave database of SaaS and AI companies, pulled on October 31, 2026: 28,984 records, which become 25,970 companies after merging records with the same website and leaving out a handful that aren't SaaS companies. Each company's TLD comes from its website's domain, with .co.uk and .com.br counted as one extension. Our separate TLD field agrees on 97.6% of the 13,042 companies where it's filled in.

The founding year is known for 14,293 companies, so the by-year figures use those. The recent years are small samples (224 companies founded in 2023 and 97 in 2024–26, grouped), and they lean towards AI companies. The AI flag is our own classification. Every figure describes the domain a company uses today, not the one it launched with.

Want the companies behind these numbers? LeadWave's list of 15,000 SaaS companies includes each company's website, founding year, size, HQ and funding, and its CEO's verified email.