We Bought fecit.io

Fecit’s address is fecit.vaudium.net.

Nothing wrong with that. But every time I gave it to someone I had to say “fecit dot vaudium dot net,” and it usually came back with “what’s vaudium?” From there I’d be explaining the company. All I’d meant to do was hand over the product’s address.

I wanted a shorter one.

I Got Plenty of Analysis

I looked up fecit.com. They wanted $30,000.

fecit.io was about $50 a year.

Before buying, I asked an AI what it thought. The answer ran long.

.io is the country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory, and since the 2024 agreement to hand the territory back, whether it gets retired is unresolved. Moving domains would mean editing 47 places in the code, and a few of them fail without raising an error. The desktop app’s update URL is compiled into the build, so killing the current address means anyone who already installed it never receives another version. A short domain is a multiplier on traffic, not a source of it. Supabase moved from .io to .com. .app has no country-code risk and costs less.

All of it was correct. And none of it was why I decided.

.app is ugly, $30,000 was out of the question, and fecit.io was short. So I bought it. Checkout took five minutes.

Then I Regretted It

Once the payment window closed, the $50 felt wasted.

Not because it’s a lot of money. Because nothing changed. The app still runs at the original address, users notice no difference, and not one line of code was touched. All the new address does is hand visitors to the landing page. What I paid for was a single redirect.

I asked again whether it had been a good buy. This time I was the one offering the argument — wouldn’t a shorter address make it easier for people to find us? Halfway through I caught myself. I was working to justify something I’d already bought.

It Didn’t Resolve

In that state, I opened the address. It didn’t load.

$ host fecit.io
Host fecit.io not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

The domain did not exist, apparently. Fifty dollars for an address that doesn’t even work, I thought. The regret got a little louder.

Checking from outside my own machine, it was fine. Both public DNS servers answered correctly, and a direct request showed the redirect working exactly as configured. The rest of the world could reach it. The only one who couldn’t was me.

The cause was my own cache. Before buying, I’d looked the domain up out of curiosity to see whether it was free, and the “this domain does not exist” answer from that lookup was still sitting there. DNS doesn’t only remember answers that exist — it remembers the absence of one too. For this domain, that was twenty-four hours.

One curious lookup, and the price was a day of waiting.

What’s Left

A day later, the $50 still stings a little. Honestly, it does.

But now I can just say “fecit.io.” Eight characters, and nobody asks a follow-up question.

That was the entire reason I bought it, and I definitely got it. However long the analysis runs, one line is enough of a reason to want something — a lesson that cost me fifty dollars.