The All-Consuming Pain of Domain Renewal for a Dead Side Project
Description
This meme, shared in a screenshot of a tweet by Elon Musk, uses the 'Where does it hurt?' pain chart format. It displays three outlines of a human body. The first, labeled 'Headache,' shows pain localized in the head. The second, 'Stomach ache,' shows pain in the abdomen. The third figure is completely red, indicating total body pain, and is labeled 'THE DOMAIN FOR THAT SIDE PROJECT YOU NEVER LAUNCHED IS UP FOR RENEWAL.' The humor stems from the relatable, soul-crushing feeling experienced by developers and entrepreneurs who are reminded of their abandoned ambitions through a recurring domain renewal fee. This annual charge serves as a painful notification of unrealized potential, procrastination, and the graveyard of good intentions that many in the tech industry accumulate over time
Comments
7Comment deleted
My portfolio of expired domains is more diverse and has seen less production than my portfolio of side projects
Nothing hits harder than the $12 auto-renew email for the “next-gen event-sourced graph SaaS” that’s still pointing to an nginx 502 - turns out DNS has better uptime than my ambition
My domain portfolio is basically a distributed system where the only thing that scales horizontally is my guilt
Every senior engineer has a GoDaddy account that reads like a museum of optimism - dozens of domains representing the MVPs that never made it past the mental whiteboard. The annual renewal emails arrive like clockwork, each one a gentle reminder that you're paying $12/year to preserve the dream of that revolutionary SaaS platform you sketched on a napkin in 2019. You tell yourself 'maybe this year,' but deep down you know that domain is just expensive nostalgia for the person you thought you'd become when you weren't drowning in sprint planning meetings and production incidents
The only thing that ever shipped from that side project was DNS: CNAME ambition -> procrastination; auto-renew @yearly, 99.999% guilt
That domain has become a call option on future motivation with a $12/year premium - unfortunately the underlying asset (spare time) has near‑zero liquidity
Unlike JWTs, your side project domain's expiration won't auto-refresh - eternal 410 Gone