Why I Renewed These Nine Domains: AI Inference Names, Technography.org, and B4N.net
Renewal season comes around and the invoice arrives with a question attached to every line. Keep paying, or let it go? I go through them one at a time, and most of the time the answer takes about four seconds. Sometimes it takes a week.
Nine names came through this round. Here’s what I like about each one.
The Inference Names
I own five names sitting on the same piece of vocabulary: aiinferences.com, gptinference.com, gptinferences.com, gptinstance.com, and gptinstances.com.
Inference is where the AI industry actually spends its money now. Training runs get written about, but the recurring cost, the thing that scales with every customer you add, is inference. If you’re selling AI compute in 2026, you’re selling inference. That’s the word on the invoice, the word in the docs, the word your sales engineer says on the call.
“Instance” is the other half of that. It’s the unit people buy. You don’t buy compute, you spin up an instance. Anyone building a hosted model service, a GPU marketplace, or a per-token API is already using both words with their customers every day. A domain that matches the vocabulary a business already uses does a lot of work before anyone reads a line of copy on the site.
These are exact-phrase .coms in the category that’s currently eating the infrastructure budget of every serious software company. I’m comfortable holding them.
Technography.org
This one I’d have renewed without thinking about it.
Technography is a real word with a real academic life. It covers the study of technology as a cultural object, how tools shape the people using them, and it shows up in research methodology literature. That’s a genuine field with journals, departments, and conference budgets.
Short, one word, twelve characters. You can say it out loud, and the person hearing it can spell it back to you. That’s rarer than it sounds. And .org is the natural home for it, since the buyer is a research group, a think tank, or a publication rather than a SaaS company.
B4N.net
Three characters.
B4N has been in use since people were typing goodbyes into chat rooms in the nineties: bye for now. It’s one of the handful of alphanumeric strings that actually decodes into an English phrase, which puts it in different company from random three-character combinations.
The natural buyer is anything in messaging, presence, or short-form communication. A departure or sign-off product could build a whole identity on it. Beyond that, three-character names are a fixed supply. Nobody is making more of them, and the ones in circulation don’t get longer.
O4K.org
Another three-character name, and .org is the right extension for the shape it takes.
O4K reads as an initiative: an organization for something, compressed the way a foundation or a campaign compresses its name for a URL. Youth programs, education nonprofits, and grant-funded projects reach for exactly this kind of short handle when the full legal name runs to nine words. It fits on a tote bag, a lanyard, and the side of a van.
Virtualtravelguide.com
The phrase describes a product that’s being built right now, at scale, by a lot of well-funded people.
Every AI trip-planning app on the market is a virtual travel guide. That’s what the thing is. It answers your questions about a city, it routes your day, it tells you which train to take. The category has gone from novelty to expected feature in about eighteen months, and the phrase that describes it sits right there in plain English.
Exact-match phrase, .com, zero explanation required. Somebody in that space is going to want it.
- Sintra at Noon, Venice at Midnight: Six European Cities and the Hour That Suits Them
- Porto’s Chestnut Season Is the Shoulder Season Worth Booking
- Venice at Night Is the Version No Access Fee Covers
- The 18th-Century Fountain Hidden Inside Bordeaux’s Customs Museum Courtyard
- The Bilbao Effect, 500 Years Early: Jerónimos Monastery And The Guggenheim
- Bilbao’s Quiet Renaissance: From Industrial Port to Design Destination
- Lisbon’s Seven Hills: A Walking Guide That Tells You the Truth
- New Orleans: An American City That Plays by Different Rules
- Ha Long Bay Without the Cruise Brochure
- Istanbul at the Threshold: A City That Has Always Been Two Things at Once
What This Actually Is
Renewals are the least glamorous part of this business, and they’re most of it. Every year you either make a case for a name or you don’t, and the names that survive a few of those rounds tend to be the ones worth something.
These nine made the case.
All are available. If one of them fits what you’re building, get in touch.