.today domains: who runs the registry and who can register

The sponsoring organisation on record with IANA is Binky Moon, LLC, listed c/o Identity Digital Inc. in Bellevue, Washington, per the IANA delegation record. Binky Moon also holds the contract as registry operator under a Base, Non-Sponsored Registry Agreement with ICANN, dated 20 September 2013, according to the ICANN registry agreement page. IANA's history for the domain shows it was first delegated to Pearl Woods, LLC back in November 2013, then handed over to Binky Moon along with 195 other domains in March 2018.

Binky Moon sits inside the Identity Digital portfolio, which supplies the administrative and technical contacts on the IANA record and runs the DNS infrastructure behind the name servers at nic.today. ICANN sits above all of it as the policy authority, holding the registry agreement that spells out the contractual rules Binky Moon has to follow.

For anyone actually buying a domain, three roles matter. The registry (Binky Moon, via Identity Digital) keeps the master database and runs the technical infrastructure for every .today domain. The registrar is the accredited company you buy from, GoDaddy or Namecheap, say, and it handles billing, support and your account. The registrant is you: the person or organisation whose name is on the registration. These are three distinct entities, and the registry itself never sells to the public.

Anyone can register a .today domain, individuals, businesses, organisations, no restrictions on where you're from or what you do. It's allocated first-come, first-served, according to GoDaddy's help documentation on .today domains. No nexus requirement, no proof of trade needed, nothing tied to nationality or location.

The registry allows a minimum one-year term and a maximum of ten, confirmed by the same source. These limits sit at the registry level, so they apply no matter which registrar you buy through.

Pricing is a different story. Promotional discounts and renewal fee structures are commercial decisions each accredited registrar makes on its own, within whatever ICANN's accreditation terms allow. The sources we checked do not confirm whether Identity Digital keeps a premium name list for .today, so if you see a premium price at checkout, treat it as the registrar's own classification until you can check it against the registry's published list, assuming one exists.

.today follows the standard ICANN generic gTLD lifecycle, since it operates under a Base, Non-Sponsored Registry Agreement dated 20 September 2013 with ICANN. Registration terms run from 1 to 10 years, per GoDaddy's .today domain details. Transfers follow ICANN's general rules: a lock period, usually 60 days, kicks in after initial registration, a prior transfer, or a change of registrant contact, and the gaining registrar needs an authorisation code from the losing one before anything can move.

Once a .today name expires, ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy takes over, as it does for every non-sponsored gTLD. Registrars have to send at least two renewal reminders before the expiry date. Miss both and the name drops into a 30-day Redemption Grace Period, DNS resolution gets switched off, and the domain sits frozen, untransferable, until a short pending-delete window runs its course and the name is finally released back into general registration. One registrar's published price table lists a $100 redemption fee for .today on top of the renewal cost, but that number comes from the registrar, not the registry, and there's no evidence of a single universal restore price across sellers. Check the exact grace window and fee with your own registrar rather than assuming a lapsed .today name will be cheap, or even possible, to get back.

Ask around about .today and you get the same handful of use cases, not one poster-child site. Dynadot pitches it for news outlets and daily blogs, while an independent domain guide adds deal and coupon sites, corporate news pages, health and wellness tips, and daily educational content to the list. None of the sources we checked points to a specific, currently live flagship built on .today, so treat it as a sensible category pick rather than an extension with a famous track record behind it.

Before you go live, worth flagging: the sources we checked show no registry-mandated HTTPS or HSTS requirement for .today, unlike some Google-run extensions, so certificate setup is entirely down to your host, not a rule you're forced into. Nothing in the sources reviewed flags email deliverability or spam-filter problems tied to .today specifically. If you're sending transactional or marketing mail from a .today address, test it yourself first, same as you'd do with any newer gTLD.

As a primary domain, .today earns its keep on a site that actually updates on a visible schedule, because the word itself promises that to anyone landing on it. Stick it on something static or built for the long haul and the mismatch will show. Better to use it as a redirect or a campaign-specific secondary domain in that case. One naming tip: keep the second-level word short and let ".today" do the work of signalling freshness. Bolting on "daily" or "now" as well just reads as repetition.