.tooling
Is .tooling a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .tooling, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A niche word already covered better by .tools; few serious projects would pick it as their main address.
developer-tool startups and manufacturing suppliers (molds, dies, machine shops) wanting a descriptive keyword address, plus a small tail of hobbyist devtools projects
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “The molds and machines behind mass production.”
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 in nearly the same word: an ungated generic category noun where the registry hopes makers, suppliers and software vendors put their primary identity on the thing-they-sell, with the same ambiguity between physical hardware and developer utilities.
Also a plain mass-noun for capital goods sold into trades and industry, betting that suppliers and manufacturers will brand on the product category rather than their own company name.
Another undifferentiated B2B goods-category noun whose success requires distributors and shops to treat a functional descriptor as a brand, exactly the demand assumption .tooling makes.
What a .tooling domain is
.tooling is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under AI & tech. Nobody is chasing .tooling today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .tooling domain extension real yet?
.tooling is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .tooling domain?
You can’t yet. A .tooling 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 .tooling was .tools, delegated on 23 January 2014.
Is .tooling a real TLD?
Not yet. .tooling is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .tooling and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.tooling · Trade & Logistics · “The molds and machines behind mass production.””Journey To The West Corporation
- I place .tooling in the 10-29 band at 18. The word is live in two markets: software 'tooling' (devtools, build systems) and manufacturing tooling (the applicant's framing), but the existing .tools TLD — by analogy, a modest-volume, low-aftermarket namespace with little primary-identity use among serious companies — already owns the shorter, more natural form of this string, and a gerund suffix reads awkwardly as a domain ending. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no evidence-by-analogy of volume or price-driven registration demand for a longer variant of an already-thin keyword TLD; it is above the 1-9 band because a real, if small, pool of devtools projects and machining suppliers plausibly registers descriptive names on it. My main market uncertainty is whether developer-tooling branding culture shifts toward suffix-style domains strongly enough over the next 5 years to create genuine primary-identity demand that .tools has not captured; adoption figures for either TLD are unknown to me here.