Why Domain Price Data Goes Stale — and How We Label It
· Data quality · Methodology
Quick answer
Why does domain price data go stale, and how should a comparison site say so?
Retail prices change, promotions expire, some registrars block automated reading, and a few publishers only release dated datasets. A comparison site cannot honestly claim every quote is live, so it should publish each offer’s provenance and evidence date, mark older quotes as stale, and state when the whole dataset was last refreshed instead of implying real-time pricing.
The four ways a price feed degrades
Price comparison is an evidence problem before it is a scraping problem. Even with a perfect crawler, some sources simply do not publish fresh data.
- A registrar republishes its price list without a date, so the evidence age is unknown.
- An automated request is blocked, and the last successfully verified quote has to be kept.
- A source publishes a dated open dataset that is refreshed rarely or not at all.
- A promotion expires while the underlying standard price stays the same.
Our labelling, and what each label means
TLD List keeps the evidence attached to the number. First-party means a figure read from a registrar’s own published price list. Snapshot means it comes from an openly licensed dataset with a dated snapshot. Stale means the evidence is more than 30 days old and the figure is a historical reference, not a current quote. The data sources page documents these definitions and the sync report records which sources could not be refreshed.
A refresh can therefore report a partial status: the dataset is genuinely re-generated, while some sources retain their previous evidence. That is a truthful outcome, not a failed build.
What "updated daily" does and does not promise
The site is rebuilt and republished every day, and the published price index carries the exact generation timestamp of that run. That guarantees you are looking at the newest dataset we have, with its real date. It does not guarantee that every individual quote was re-verified in the last 24 hours, and we do not present it that way.
Frequently asked questions
Is every price on TLD List live right now?
No. Some offers come from first-party price lists, some from dated snapshots, and some are older than 30 days and explicitly marked stale. The site shows the provenance and the dataset generation date rather than claiming real-time pricing.
Why not hide stale prices entirely?
Hiding them would make the catalogue look complete while silently dropping the long tail of TLDs. Showing them with an explicit label preserves the information and lets you verify before buying.
How can I check when the data was generated?
The homepage shows the IANA sync date and the price dataset date, and the published prices-index.json carries a generated_at timestamp for the current run.
Sources
Primary sources for the claims above.