.maker
Is .maker a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.maker is contested: 4 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 8 October 2026. They are Plan Bee, Identity Digital, GoDaddy Registry and Starlight (Namecheap).
A friendly identity for DIY creators and indie builders, but most serious projects will still pick a mainstream ending.
indie hardware hackers, craftspeople, makerspaces, and creator-economy solo brands who want an identity-flavored personal or studio address
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: an uncredentialed, self-declared creative vocation-noun that an individual adopts as their primary personal identity, so the registry lives or dies on whether enough people say "I am one" and pay to prove it.
Same bet: a singular person-noun for a self-identified craft with no licensing body, sold one identity at a time to individuals and their small studios/agents rather than to companies buying a category.
Also a person-noun vocation aimed at practitioners putting their own name on it, but it leans on a formal professional identity with employer-anchored careers, where .maker's population is hobbyist-to-microbusiness and much less institutionally defined.
What a .maker domain is
.maker is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Culture category. 4 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .maker domain extension real yet?
.maker is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .maker domain?
You can’t yet. A .maker name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .maker was .author, delegated on 5 December 2015.
Is .maker a real TLD?
Not yet. .maker is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .maker is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Starlight (Namecheap) · noteDomain Name Wire
- Plan Bee · first recordedICANN
- Identity Digital · first recordedICANN
- GoDaddy Registry · first recordedICANN
- Starlight (Namecheap) · first recordedICANN
“MEI2627T-T58035 · Menkalinan Exploration, Inc. · primary · contention set 2026-144 NA2631T-T71478 · Registry Services, LLC · primary · contention set 2026-144 NS2662T-T21198 · Neigh Sayer, LLC · primary · contention set 2026-144 WVL2684T-T36786 · Workbench Ventures LLC · primary · contention set 2026-144”ICANN
“For us, moving into the registry side is a natural extension of what we have been building.”Domain Name Wire
- I place .maker in the 30-49 band (usable but limited). It is above the vanity band because 'maker' names a real, persistent buyer group — DIY/hardware hobbyists, craft sellers, indie creators — and by analogy with .design, which achieved genuine primary-identity use among designers, a semantically warm identity string can earn steady niche registrations, helped here by the applicant being a registrar-affiliated venture with retail distribution. It stays below the strong-niche band because, by analogy with .build/.builders and similar occupational strings that saw thin adoption and weak aftermarkets, a diffuse identity word rarely becomes a default that serious projects choose without explanation, and the maker-movement cultural moment appears softer than at its peak (qualitative judgment; volumes unknown). My main market uncertainty over the next 5 years is whether creator-economy individuals adopt any niche TLD as primary identity at meaningful scale rather than defaulting to .com or platform handles.