Tony Moon
78460d35c9
Free, no-account tool for naming a business and finding a domain you can actually register. Availability uses no paid API and no key. IANA's RDAP bootstrap maps ~1,200 TLDs to their authoritative registry servers (404 = free, 200 = taken); the handful with no RDAP at all (.io, .co, .me, .sh, .gg, .us) fall back to a DNS NS lookup and are reported as "probably free" rather than confirmed, because a registered-but-undelegated domain is indistinguishable that way. Name generation is pure, deterministic, and client-side — eight strategies over a curated word bank, ranked by a scorer that does the real quality work. Three of its guards (prefix-only hint matching, -er-only syncopation, truncation rejection) exist because of specific bad output and should not be relaxed. Optional AI suggestions use the visitor's OWN Anthropic/Gemini key from localStorage, called browser-direct, so this stays free to run. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JChWdFJPCRxMBxErb8kUVK
93 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
93 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
# names.poweredbyotm.com
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Free business-name finder: type a few keywords, get brandable name ideas, and see
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which domains are actually free — checked against the registries themselves.
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- **Stack:** Next.js 15 (App Router, `output: "standalone"`), React 18, no DB, no
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auth, public. Name generation runs **client-side**; availability is a server
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route because browsers can't do DNS and RDAP servers send no CORS headers.
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- **Repo:** `tonym/names` on `git.poweredbyotm.com`.
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- **Deploy:** OTM platform — first-party app (`/apps`), built + deployed via the
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platform MCP, not docker-compose-from-this-repo.
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## How availability works — and what it costs (nothing)
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There is no paid domain API here and no key to manage.
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1. **RDAP** (RFC 7482), the registries' own replacement for WHOIS. IANA
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publishes a bootstrap file at `data.iana.org/rdap/dns.json` mapping every TLD
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to its authoritative RDAP server. We cache it for 24h, resolve the TLD
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ourselves, and query that server directly — `404` means unregistered, `200`
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means registered. Covers ~1,200 TLDs including `.com/.net/.org/.ai/.dev/.app`.
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2. **DNS `NS` lookup**, for the TLDs that publish no RDAP server at all — `.io`,
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`.co`, `.me`, `.sh`, `.gg`, `.us`, `.de`. NXDOMAIN strongly suggests
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unregistered, but a registered domain with no delegated nameservers looks
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identical. These report `unverified-available` and the UI shows them in amber
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as *probably free*, never as a confirmed green.
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**Do not "simplify" this by pointing everything at `rdap.org`.** Its redirector
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returns a bare `404` both for "this domain is free" and for "I have no RDAP
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server for this TLD" — the two cases are indistinguishable from the status code,
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which is exactly the bug that would report every `.io` as available.
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Manners, since we're an anonymous client against other people's public
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endpoints: 60 domains max per request, 8-wide concurrency, a per-IP token
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bucket, and a 10-minute result cache.
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## Name generation
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`src/lib/generate.ts` is pure and deterministic — the same
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`(keywords, style, seed)` always yields the same list, so re-renders don't
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reshuffle results and a shared URL reproduces what the sender saw.
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Eight strategies (compound, suffix-word, action, blend, coined, clipped, root,
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domain hack) over the vocabulary in `src/lib/wordbank.ts`. The strategies are
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cheap and dumb on purpose — **quality comes from `scoreName`**, so tune the
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scorer before adding more words.
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Three guards exist because of specific bad output, and removing them brings it
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straight back:
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- `expandKeywords` matches category hints by **prefix, never substring** — plain
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containment let `repair` match the `ai` category (rep-**ai**-r) and drag
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neural-network vocabulary into an auto-shop brief.
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- `syncopate` only drops the schwa from a final `-er` (`flicker` → `flickr`).
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The original "drop the last vowel" produced `crema` → `crem`, `kettle` →
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`kettl`, `security` → `securit`.
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- `isTruncation` rejects any candidate that is a strict prefix of a word the
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generator knows. This is what keeps stumps out of the results.
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`diversify()` caps each strategy at ~28% of the returned list. Without it the
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top 20 came back as eighteen coinages — scoring alone clumps badly.
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## Bring-your-own AI key
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Optional. `/settings` stores an Anthropic or Gemini key in `localStorage`
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(`names.aiKey`) and the browser calls that provider **directly** — the key never
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touches our server. Same pattern as `rpo`'s Google Vision key, for the same
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reason: the platform has no per-app env tool, and this is a free public tool that
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shouldn't hold a metered credential.
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The `anthropic-dangerous-direct-browser-access` header is correct here and would
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be wrong in a product that owns the key. The distinction is whose key it is.
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## Registrar links
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`src/lib/registrars.ts`. Links are plain today — every `affiliateCode` is `""`.
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Fill one in and `HAS_AFFILIATE_LINKS` flips, which turns on the footer
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disclosure automatically. Keeping both in one file is deliberate: a disclosure
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that can drift out of sync with whether links actually pay is worse than none.
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## Local development
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```bash
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npm install
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npm run dev # http://localhost:3000
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npm run typecheck
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npm run build
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```
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No env vars are needed to run it. The suggestions lightbulb degrades to a quiet
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"not configured" state unless `GITEA_URL` / `GITEA_TOKEN` / `GITEA_REPO` are set
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(the platform injects those at deploy time).
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