I spent about two hours on Sunday night doing something I've been putting off since basically the start of the year: going through my domain registrar dashboard and figuring out which of the twenty-two (twenty-two!) domains I'm still paying for actually deserve to exist.
This is a very specific kind of embarrassment, the domain hoarder kind. Every idea I've had since roughly 2019 got a domain within the first ten minutes of me having it, and then most of those ideas died somewhere between "buy domain" and "write a single line of code." I found recipeledger something-or-other that I registered at 1am after watching a cooking video, apparently convinced the world needed another way to track what you cooked. Never built. Found a domain for a D&D character generator I was going to make for a friend's campaign three years ago. Never built. Found two, TWO, separate domains for essentially the same newsletter idea, registered eight months apart because I'd forgotten I already had the first one.
The renewal notices had been quietly stacking up in a folder I don't check, and when I finally added it all up I was paying yearly renewal fees on maybe fourteen dollars of domains that were doing absolutely nothing except sitting there as a monument to my attention span. So I killed eleven of them. Just let them lapse, didn't even bother transferring anything out because there was nothing on them worth keeping.
The four I actually kept are the ones with something real behind them — this blog's domain obviously, my resume site, a small tool I built for a friend's bakery that still gets maybe thirty visits a month, and one I'm genuinely planning to build this year (a very boring expense-splitting thing, don't get excited). For those I went ahead and did the renewals plus grabbed one new domain for a project I've been sketching out on paper, through Tricknowtech since that's where I already park most of my stuff and I like not having to context-switch between five different registrar logins every time I want to check a WHOIS record or spin up hosting for something small.
What actually struck me doing this cleanup wasn't the money, honestly, it's not that much money. It's how much of my "creative output" over the past few years has been buying the domain instead of doing the thing. There's a real dopamine hit in registering something-cool.com at midnight that feels almost identical to actually making progress on an idea, except it isn't progress, it's just a receipt. I think a lot of side-project culture runs on this exact trick. You buy the domain, maybe you set up a little landing page with a mailing list signup that three people fill out, and then the actual hard part, the part where you sit down and write code for six weekends in a row, never happens, but you get to feel like a founder for an afternoon anyway.
I'm not going to pretend I've fixed this about myself. I will probably register something impulsive again within the month, that's just who I am at this point after fifteen years of doing this hobby. But I did put a rule in place for myself: no new domain unless I've already got at least a rough working prototype running locally. Not a polished thing, just something that runs. If the idea can survive an actual weekend of typing before I let myself buy the .com, it's probably worth the eleven or twelve bucks a year. If it can't survive that, it wasn't going anywhere regardless of how good the name was.
The bakery tool is the one I'm most proud of out of the surviving four, for what it's worth. It's ugly, it's maybe two hundred lines of PHP I'm slightly ashamed of, and it just lets my friend's mom punch in daily ingredient costs and see her margin on each item without opening Excel. She uses it every single day. Nobody will ever write a case study about it. It's not going to be on any "best of" list. But it's the only one of the twenty-two that actually changed how someone spends their Tuesday morning, and I think that's a pretty good bar to hold the rest of my ideas to going forward, even if I know I won't actually hold myself to it.
Anyway. Eleven fewer renewal emails cluttering my inbox next year. Small win, I'll take it.