DomainTools is by far the most used WHOIS research tool among domain investors, and through the years it has expanded to provide services beyond plain vanilla WHOIS.
Historic WHOIS data provide a valuable insight to how domain ownership information changes, and it’s a great sidekick in researching cases of domain theft.
In an email sent out earlier today, DomainTools announces a membership restructuring.
DomaintTools.com
The new member level is called “Personal,” and is designed to serve the Domain Research community.
Despite the company’s shift towards the enterprise security market with the launch of DomainTools Iris and API integration with Splunk and ThreatConnect, DomainTools recognizes the value of domain name research members.
Thus, the Personal DomainTools Membership package adds four products never been offered before to individual members:
- Bulk Parsed Whois and Reverse Whois Research Mode have previously only been available to Enterprise members.
- Reverse IP Whois, which works like Reverse Whois for domain Whois, but across IP Whois records.
- Personal Membership also includes 5 Domain Reports per month.
These changes in membership structure arrive with changes in pricing. Many individual members will experience a price increase to $99 dollars per month, or $995 dollars per year.
These changes will begin on June 25, 2016.
With that in mind, DomainTools will be offering a 30% discount with a special code, for a transition to existing members. This transition will also signal the end of life for all existing membership levels: gold, silver, pro, standard, etc. and related add-ons.
Here is a breakdown of all the features that the DomainTools Personal Account will support:
DomainTools : Personal account.
An FAQ section about membership upgrades details the transition at DomainTools.com.
I think the pricing shift is a joke, I can’t understand how any company can say their data systems are most costly than they were 5 to 10 years ago. I could have understood a price rise by 733% is a joke for long time legacy customers.
You had many more customers who would have told you the legacy pricing was worth a magnitude more. It seems it was a poorly executed strategy by DomainTools team where a handful of heavy users were grouped with personal users that used the service within fair and reasonable use. They have used personal accounts to fund a large portion of the resources used to scrape whois data and now selling it to enterprise customers.
There are several alternative platforms that people should consider using instead of DomainTools platform!
I have already cancelled my membership after 8.5 years as a paying customer!