The Price Table That Surprises Everyone
When people first see ENS pricing, they do a double-take. The annual registration fees look like this:
| Name length | Annual fee (approx.) |
|---|---|
| 3 characters | ~$250 (0.1 ETH) |
| 4 characters | ~$25 (0.01 ETH) |
| 5+ characters | ~$2.50 (0.001 ETH) |
That is not a typo. Three letters costs 100 times more than five letters.
Why Short Names Are Priced Higher
The short answer: scarcity and demand.
There are exactly 17,576 possible three-letter .eth combinations (26³). That includes everything from zzz.eth to abc.eth to nft.eth. Most of the genuinely useful ones were registered years ago, often by speculators who understood early that short names have real secondary market value.
Pricing short names at 0.1 ETH per year serves two purposes. First, it deters registration of three-letter names purely for squatting — you have to pay to hold them. Second, it means that anyone who holds dao.eth or btc.eth has skin in the game and will either use the name or sell it rather than sitting on it indefinitely.
Four-letter names at 0.01 ETH follow the same logic, scaled to the larger supply. There are 456,976 possible four-letter combinations — roughly 26 times more than three-letter names — so the price reflects the higher availability.
Five characters and above costs 0.001 ETH per year regardless of length. At current ETH prices, that works out to roughly $2–5 per year, cheaper than most traditional domain renewals.
What This Means in Practice
If you are looking for a name, the math strongly favors five-letter-or-longer names. The price drop from four to five letters is 10x. For most personal or project names, a five-to-eight character name is both affordable and meaningful.
The catch: five-letter common words and names are mostly taken. You will not find alice.eth or green.eth available. But creative variations, compound words, handles, and project names often still are.
Basenames (.base.eth) uses the same pricing tiers. The difference is that Basenames launched in August 2024, which means the pool of unclaimed names is larger. Names that were claimed years ago on ENS are sometimes still available on Basenames.
Secondary Market Prices
Short ENS names trade on OpenSea and other NFT markets. The secondary market price for a name has nothing to do with the annual registration fee — it reflects perceived brand value, length, and memorability.
exchange.eth sold for hundreds of ETH. Three-letter names with obvious utility routinely trade for 10–50 ETH. These are outliers. Most names trade for their intrinsic utility to the buyer, not as financial instruments.
If you are registering a name for personal or project use rather than speculation, ignore the secondary market. Register what is useful to you at the standard annual fee and hold it.
Checking What Is Still Available
Given all of this, the practical question is: which names you want are still registerable at base price?
That is exactly what this tool answers. Paste in your list of candidates and it will tell you which are available on ENS, which on Basenames, expiry dates for registered ones, and links to register the available ones.