Most indie hackers I know spend an embarrassing amount of time on the naming part. We argue with ourselves over the perfect .com, eventually settle for some janky combo of words with random consonants ripped out, and ship a domain we secretly don't love.
There's a quieter option a lot of builders haven't seriously considered: .Vegas. It's a geographic TLD, but it does NOT require you to be in Las Vegas or build anything Vegas-related. What it does give you is a TLD that sounds bigger than it costs, reads as memorable, and is still wide open in 2026.
I went down a small rabbit hole this week looking at side-project ideas that would have an almost unfair head start on .Vegas. Here are five.
1. A weekend trip planner
Domain: weekend.vegas or trip.vegas
This is the lowest-hanging fruit and I'm honestly surprised nobody's built it yet. A tiny webapp that takes a Friday-to-Sunday window and spits back a fully booked itinerary: flight, hotel, two restaurant reservations, one show, one activity. Three clicks, done.
Why it works on .Vegas: the domain is the elevator pitch. Nobody needs to read your tagline. The URL bar tells you what the product does. That's worth more than most landing-page copy will ever earn.
2. A bachelor/bachelorette party coordinator
Domain: bach.vegas, party.vegas, last.vegas
Group-trip coordination is genuinely awful. Splitwise + a group chat + a shared Notion doc + that one friend who keeps forgetting to Venmo back. There's room for a niche product here that handles the deposit splits, the "who's in for the cabana" upsells, and the inevitable last-minute flight changes.
Why it works on .Vegas: the URL doubles as a tagline. You don't have to explain what kind of trip it's for.
3. A booking aggregator for shows and residencies
Domain: shows.vegas, tonight.vegas
Caesars, MGM, Live Nation, AXS, Vivid Seats, the venue's own ticketing system — finding a good show on a specific Tuesday night is a pain. A scraper-backed booking aggregator that's honest about its affiliate links could carve out a real niche.
Why it works on .Vegas: SEO. Geo-TLDs are a small but real signal for "this site is about Las Vegas," and you're going to be competing for keywords like "vegas shows tonight" anyway. Why fight it?
4. A local-business directory done right
Domain: eats.vegas, coffee.vegas, food.vegas
Yelp is bad and Google Maps is fine but generic. There's actual room for a curated, opinionated local directory in a high-tourism city — the kind of thing that includes one good sentence about each place instead of seventy reviews that contradict each other.
Why it works on .Vegas: a curated directory is exactly the kind of thing that benefits from a strong identity. eats.vegas immediately signals "small, local, opinionated." eats-vegas-guide.com signals "SEO farm, exit quickly."
5. A poker / blackjack / sports-betting tracker
Domain: track.vegas, bankroll.vegas, vig.vegas
I'd build this myself if I weren't already drowning in side projects. A clean web/mobile app that logs sessions, calculates bankroll variance, and gives honest reports on whether you're actually winning over time. The existing apps are dated and feature-bloated.
Why it works on .Vegas: trust signaling. A finance-adjacent product feels more credible on a geo-TLD than on bankrolltracker-app.io.
The honest part
None of these will succeed because of the domain. They'll succeed or fail on whether the product is good, whether you ship it, and whether you can find your first hundred users.
But the domain is a small accelerant. Memorable URLs get shared more in DMs. They get pronounced correctly on podcasts. They feel like a real company. And right now, in 2026, the best ones across .Vegas are still sitting on the shelf for ~$15.
If you're naming a side project this weekend and you haven't checked it as an option, take ten minutes and look. You might find something you like more than the weird .com variant you were settling for.
Have you built anything on a geo-TLD? I'd be curious how the conversions compare to a .com — drop a note in the comments.
