What’s New at Afternic: Good as Gold Payouts, $5 Million LTO Limit, and More

By Prakash Sadarangani | April 9, 2026

2025 was a banner year for Afternic, with a consistent drumbeat of new features and updates including a new Transaction Assurance engine, Self-Brokerage, and Search Insights. We set out at the start of this year to continue bringing value to our sellers, with your feedback driving what we’re doing.

From new payout options to buyer discovery improvements, the first quarter of 2026 built around removing friction and expanding opportunity.

Here are some of the highlights.

Good as Gold Payouts: A Smarter Way to Get Paid

In January, we introduced Good as Gold, a new payout method that deposits your Afternic sale proceeds directly into your GoDaddy account balance as account credit.

The practical difference is speed and cost. Traditional bank transfers take 5 to 7 business days to land. Good as Gold funds are available as soon as the payout is issued. There are no wire fees and no currency conversion costs, which matters especially for international sellers.

Once your balance is funded, you can use it across GoDaddy: bid on domains at GoDaddy Auctions, cover renewals, register new names, or put it toward transfers and other GoDaddy products. If you’re the kind of seller who turns one sale into the next acquisition, this makes that cycle a lot easier.

Until April 30^th, you can earn a 3% bonus on Good as Gold payouts. Learn more.

Lease to Own: From $100,000 to $5 Million

At the ICA this year, GoDaddy’s General Manager of the Aftermarket, Alan Shiflett, announced a key change to Lease to Own: a maximum price increase from $100,000 to $5 million.

Since launching Lease to Own in 2023, we capped our transaction size at $100,000 and closely monitored the rollout. The feedback has been loud and clear: sellers with domains priced above $100,000 want to use Lease to Own.

With Lease to Own now a key part of seller strategy, we raised the ceiling to $5 million.

Where the new limit is live:

GoDaddy search results
GoDaddy For Sale Landers
Afternic Seller Custom Checkout Link (Max Lease Term 12 Months)
Afternic Broker-Assisted Sales

For Sale Landers Are Indexable

Some of the most impactful improvements we make aren’t visible in your Afternic dashboard. They happen at the infrastructure level. This one has been in progress since last October, and it’s now fully live.

Afternic’s popular Request Price, Buy Now, and Custom Landers are indexable by Google’s search crawler.

As part of GoDaddy’s broader SEO architecture, landers were previously blocked from search crawlers. Sellers asked us if their landers could be found in Google, so we went back and worked through what it would take to make that possible.

How we got here

Our engineering team tackled this in two phases:

Phase 1: Request Price landers on Afternic URLs were reopened to Google’s crawler. Search indexing started almost immediately.

Phase 2: Custom and Buy Now landers required a more involved migration, moving to ForSale.GoDaddy.com URLs. This was a significant undertaking: millions of domain listings needed to be transitioned to the updated URL structure while preserving the GoDaddy branding that buyers already trust.

Next, Request Price landers will follow the same URL migration to GoDaddy domains, following a redesigned lander layout that showed improved conversion rates.

Expanding Exports

The largest portfolio holders trust us to get deals done. Thanks to behind-the-scenes work completed in Q1, those portfolio holders now have async exports to help keep their pricing and inventory up to date.

Exports produce a downloadable CSV file from your Portfolio page. Before this update, large exports were challenging.

Following backend infrastructure work, sellers can now access a dedicated domain exports page. Large exports of over 100,000 domains run in the background with no timeouts, and all exports remain available for 30 days.

Folder Management: Portfolio Organization Built for Scale

Another recent update is helping large domain portfolio owners organize their inventory on-site and reducing time to manage their domain listings.

Folders solve a true friction point for sellers having a lot of names by helping you segment your domain names by category, pricing, TLDs, or any characteristic that makes sense for your portfolio.

From the Portfolio page, you can now create and manage Folders, then act on domains with bulk actions across the entire folder. That cuts the operational noise that comes with managing large inventory and makes it easier to run pricing experiments or test listing strategies at scale.

What’s Next?

Q1 laid a strong foundation, and Q2 will build on it. We have more releases in flight across payments, seller tooling, and the buyer experience, and we’ll keep you updated as each one goes live.

The best ideas on our roadmap have come directly from sellers. If something is slowing you down or if there’s a capability you wish Afternic had, we genuinely want to hear it. Reach out at domaincommunity@godaddy.com.

Stay tuned for more updates, and happy selling.