This announcement of the free domain API was originally published back in April 1, 2013 (April Fool’s Day). Since people still read this page in 2023 but fail to see the date, I’ve decided to rewrite the entire article to reflect the current state.
FreeDomainAPI.com was originally intended as an April Fools joke back in 2013, but one month after the joke, we published the real deal. You really could do Whois lookups with an API, and there really was an API that allowed you to check domain name availability for free. A few years later, it became harder to support millions of requests that users were making. It didn’t help that many users were registering more than one time (some hundreds of times) to game the system. We thought that this wasn’t fair to us or other users! After several different failed attempts to stop this, and without resource to support it, we’ve decided to introduce a minimal one-time access fee. We thought that this was a better option compared to completely shutting down the service.
However, with this fee, people were leaving hateful comments saying this was false advertising. I can understand $9 payment doesn’t make something free, but it allows you to make millions of requests. So, we stopped saying these requests are free, but keep the domain name freedomainapi.com.
Free domain API
With that being said, years later, we could no longer support that version of free domain API. Or, should we say the $9 “all-you-can-make requests” API. As of 13th November 2020., we shut down this website. The users that paid for this access years ago, got complimentary 100,000 API requests here to make the transition easier.
New HTTP request URL
In the past, the old HTTP request for domain availability check on freedomainapi.com was:
GET
http://api.freedomainapi.com/?domain=freedomainapi.com&r=taken&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY
This is no longer working! You need to log in to whoapi.com, get your new API key, and make requests to the following URL:
http://api.whoapi.com/?apikey=YOUR_API_KEY&r=taken&domain=whoapi.com.com
How can this domain API help you?
Finding a great domain has never been easier. Are you looking to uncover unique industry related domains? Use this domain API, and make millions of queries for a minimal one-time access fee! That’s right. If you want to check a complete English, French, Italian or any other dictionary against any gTLD or ccTLD like .com, .net, .org, .me or .co, not a problem! Here’s a complete list of TLDs WhoAPI supports.
Registration is simple and easy. You can start using Whois Lookup API in a matter of minutes.
10,000 free domain API requests
If you sign up right now, you can get access to whois domain API. You can have unlimited domain availability checks for all your needs. This function works great for bulk domain availability tools, SEO strategies, domain investing, and many more.
Get 10,000 requests for free
Every new user gets 10,000 requests for free. You don’t need a credit card, but there are some things to consider.
- You need a valid “high quality” email address (temporary email, gmail, yahoo will only get you 100 requests)
- You can sign up only once. We have a 1 account per 1 user policy
- This is a one-time offer. The 10,000 requests you get will not replenish. Once you make 10,000 requests, that’s finished
