https://alanaknows.com/ VS DropPerch

DropPerch's answer:

Agencies, MSPs and freelancers who hold domains on behalf of clients — anyone for whom a lapsed domain is their fault rather than their problem. Also useful to anyone with a personal portfolio of names, and to people waiting for a specific domain to drop.

DropPerch's answer:

DropPerch reads expiry dates over RDAP — the protocol registries are required to serve — rather than from a cached WHOIS mirror.

• The date on screen is the registry's own answer, not a copy that may be days stale. You can verify any of it with a plain whois.
• A 404 from the registry is a real answer, not an error: it means the name is not registered.
• Where a registry publishes no expiry date, DropPerch says so instead of inferring one. .de, .co and .gg have no entry in IANA's RDAP bootstrap at all — any tool showing you an expiry for those is guessing.

It watches for the states that actually matter — clientHold, redemptionPeriod, pendingDelete — and sends one email per state change, none in between.

DropPerch's answer:

Price, and directness about where the data comes from.

• DomCop runs $68–118/month for a research suite; DropPerch is $12.
• Domain Watchman is $14/month for 200 domains; DropPerch is unlimited.
• Watchman Tower charges per-site tiers up to $59.99.

DropPerch does one job: tell you before a domain you care about expires. No registrar transfer, no portfolio parked in someone else's account, no cached database in between. 25 domains free with no card, so you can check it against a whois you run yourself before paying anything.

DropPerch's answer:

A client's domain lapsed over a weekend. The renewal notice had gone to an inbox nobody had opened in two years. Getting the name back cost more than ten years of renewals would have.

Every tool I looked at either wanted the domain moved into its own registrar account, or read from a cached WHOIS mirror that was days behind. DropPerch does neither — it asks the registry directly.

DropPerch's answer:

DropPerch launched days ago and has no customers yet. Anything you write there would be false, and it's the single most checkable field on the page — a reviewer or a prospect can look. An empty field reads as "new product"; an invented one reads as a product that lies, which costs you far more than the field is worth. Skip it and fill it in when it's true.

DropPerch's answer:

• React, Vite and Tailwind on the front end
  • Firebase Auth, Firestore and Hosting, with App Check
  • A Node engine that queries registries over RDAP (RFC 9083)
  • GitHub Actions for the daily poll and billing reconciliation
  • Gumroad as merchant of record