.dev Domain Review: Who It Works For, Who Should Skip It

.dev is Google's other "secure-by-default" TLD — HSTS preloaded, like .app, and aimed squarely at developers. Eight years after its 2019 general-availability launch, it's settled into a clearly-defined niche: developer-facing tools, technical content sites, and personal portfolios. Outside that niche, it's a poor choice. Here's where the line is.

The short version

.dev is the right pick when your audience is engineers and your product is something they use as part of their workflow. It's the wrong pick if your audience is anyone else, or if your product is consumer-facing infrastructure that talks about itself in non-technical terms.

What .dev does well

• Audience signal to engineers. Developers parse .dev instantly as "for me." This is meaningful for inbound discovery — engineers click .dev results faster than .io results in technical-content searches, in the click-through data we've seen.
• HTTPS by default. Same registry-level HSTS as .app. No mixed-content footguns, no certificate-misconfiguration phishing, automatic security baseline.
• Developer-tool brand fit. When your product is a CLI, an SDK, an API, a build tool, a code analyzer — .dev sits naturally in that category.
• Documentation sites. A common pattern: app.tld for the product, docs.tld.dev for the docs. The .dev reads as "this is the engineering surface."

Where .dev underperforms

• Consumer-facing products. Anything where end users aren't developers. .dev reads as off-category to non-technical audiences, who often don't even recognize it as a real TLD.
• AI products with broad audience. AI-native products that aren't pure dev-tools should be on .ai or .com. .dev boxes the product into "this is for engineers" prematurely.
• B2B SaaS aimed at non-engineering buyers. If your buyer is the CMO, the COO, the CFO — .dev is the wrong shape. They'll read it as "this is built by engineers for engineers" which isn't a buying signal in their context.
• Anything where the buyer might be enterprise procurement. Procurement teams flag unfamiliar TLDs as a soft risk. .com clears that gate; .dev adds a question.

Pricing patterns we see

.dev has settled into reasonable, stable pricing — much more so than .ai or even .io:

• Single-word dictionary .dev: $5K–$60K. Dictionary words that read as developer-relevant ("build", "deploy", "test", "lint", "ship") cluster at the high end.
• Two-word brandable .dev: $200–$3K. Wide market, moves on volume.
• Personal portfolio names: registry-priced, $15–$25/year. Many engineers grab firstname.dev or lastname.dev for blogs and portfolios; this is the dominant use case by sheer count.

Renewal pricing has been stable since launch. The registry has not pulled the kind of pricing surprise that .io did in 2024.

How developers actually use it

In the conversations we have with engineering-led founders, three use patterns dominate:

1. Personal sites. <name>.dev as the engineer's portfolio. This is the easiest TLD purchase any engineer makes — the audience match is perfect and the cost is trivial.
2. Side projects and OSS. A library, a CLI tool, a dev-experience app gets a .dev for its homepage. Often paired with a GitHub repo of the same name.
3. Documentation subdomains. Established companies use .dev for their developer-docs surface (somecompany.dev, often a redirect to docs.somecompany.com).

The pattern that's notably missing: B2B SaaS companies branding their main product on .dev. The few that have tried have mostly migrated to .com or .io within 18 months.

The HSTS thing — same caveats as .app

Like .app, every .dev site is HSTS-preloaded at the registry level. This means:

• You cannot serve a .dev site over HTTP. Browsers will block the load.
• You need a valid TLS certificate from day one. Letsencrypt + Certbot handles this automatically; in 2026 it's a non-issue but worth flagging if you're new to TLS automation.
• Email on .dev requires the same MX/SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup as any modern domain. The HSTS only affects HTTP/HTTPS, not email.

Comparison: .dev vs .io for dev tools

The most common question we get from engineering-led founders: "Should this product be .dev or .io?" The honest answer depends on the buyer:

• Engineers picking the tool themselves: .dev reads slightly more native, .io reads slightly more enterprise. Either works.
• Engineering managers procuring the tool for their team: .io reads more enterprise-credible. .dev reads more startup-experimental.
• Cross-functional buyers (PMs, ops, security): .io works better; .dev confuses them.

If your sales motion is bottom-up adoption from individual engineers, .dev is fine and may even help. If it's top-down procurement, default to .io.

How we score .dev names

Six dimensions, with two .dev-specific notes:

1. Audience fit dominates the score. A .dev domain aimed at non-engineers gets a meaningful penalty in our brandability and sector-fit scores; the TLD is actively miscommunicating to that audience.
2. Personal-portfolio names are valued differently from product names. john.dev is worth $50–$200 in casual resale; johndev.com could be worth $5K. Personal names on .dev are a use case, not an investment category.

Should you buy a .dev today?

For an engineering-targeted developer tool: yes, especially if the matching .com or .io is unaffordable.

For a personal portfolio or OSS project: yes, register one and don't think twice — registry prices are reasonable and the audience match is perfect.

For anything else: probably not. Look at .com, .io, or your category-appropriate alt-TLD first.

If you're holding a .dev and want a real number on it, send it in for an appraisal. The methodology is the same as our other TLD reviews — we run the six-dimension scoring against current comp data.