Buy your .chat domain today

.chat domains are used mainly by messaging and support software rather than by AI startups. The clearest live examples are the products themselves: Rocket.Chat, an open-source team messaging platform, and Crisp, a customer support suite, both run on .chat addresses.

Beyond software, the extension fits anything with conversation at the center. Community forums, moderated help groups, live event Q&A pages, language exchange projects and counseling or peer support services all read naturally on it.

There is a smaller pattern worth knowing: companies using a .chat address for one channel rather than the whole brand, so the main site stays on .com and the live help lives on its own short name.

No, .chat is open to anyone with no restrictions. The registry runs no eligibility check, asks for no documents and applies no industry test.

The registry publishes portfolio-wide policies covering acceptable use, reserved names and DNSSEC, and there is no .chat-specific eligibility document at all. That absence is the answer rather than a gap in the paperwork.

So a club, a school, a charity or a one-person consultancy can register a .chat name as easily as a software company. Availability is the only gate, and it is first come, first served.

Yes, a .chat domain works well as a dedicated address for one part of your service while your main site stays where it is. This is one of the more sensible uses of the extension.

You point the .chat name at a page on your existing site, or at a separate help center, and link both ways. Wix lets you connect more than one domain to a single site, so there is no duplicate build to maintain.

Decide up front which address search engines should treat as canonical, and make the other a redirect. Then use the .chat name where a human will read it: in an email signature, on a receipt, on the back of a card.

Most short and one-word .chat names are not available at the standard rate, and the obvious product vocabulary went early.

What remains is largely priced as premium. That designation is a registry decision rather than a seller’s markup, the list is shared with sellers rather than published, and it can change over time. A premium name also tends to renew at the premium rate, so the higher figure is annual rather than one-off.

Compounds are where the value is. An invented word, a product name or a two-word phrase will usually come back at the standard rate, and it is easier to protect as a trademark than a generic noun would be.

A .chat address is easier to remember than most newer extensions, because the word describes what the product does rather than naming a category.

That helps in the places a product name actually travels: said out loud in a demo, typed from memory after a conversation, read off a slide. The risk is the familiar one, that people default to .com when recalling any address, so some traffic will go there instead.

If the matching .com is available, owning it and pointing it at your site closes that gap. If it is not, use the .chat address consistently everywhere rather than alternating between it and a subdomain.

A .chat domain costs considerably more in year two than in year one, and the gap on this extension is one of the larger ones.

The advertised first-year price is a promotion and the renewal is the true cost of holding the address. Some large sellers publish the introductory figure prominently and no renewal figure at all on the same page, which makes comparing offers on the headline misleading.

Find the renewal before you commit, and if you are naming a product rather than running a campaign, treat it as a recurring line item. Turn on auto-renew, because a messaging service that loses its domain loses every link its users have saved.

For an AI product .ai is currently the stronger signal, and .chat says something different rather than something weaker. Which you want depends on what you are selling.

.ai has become the shorthand for the category, so it tells a visitor what kind of company you are. .chat tells them what your product does. If the conversation is the product, and a user will spend their time in a message window, .chat describes that more precisely than .ai does.

There is no evidence that the AI wave has changed .chat’s pricing or availability, so you are not competing with a gold rush here the way you are on .ai. Check both, and consider taking the .chat name for the product even if the company sits elsewhere.