Why doesn't the registrar's renewal reminder reach my agency?

Registrar reminders go to the registrant's email on file — usually the client, not the agency that manages the site. If the client owns the registrar account, your agency is not on that notification thread at all, so the first you hear of a lapse is the site going down.

Can't I just track renewals in a spreadsheet?

A spreadsheet works until it doesn't. Someone has to enter every domain and its renewal date by hand, keep dates current when registrations change, and actually look at the sheet on the right day. One stale row or one missed glance is one dark client site. It scales poorly past a handful of domains.

How can I monitor domains across multiple registrars in one place?

Rather than logging into each registrar dashboard, read each domain's authoritative registry expiry via RDAP. A monitor that does this on a schedule covers every registrar uniformly, because it queries the registry rather than the registrar's account UI.

What's the earliest I should be warned before a domain expires?

Escalating warnings work best: a first heads-up around 60 days out gives time to chase a client for payment or card details, then louder reminders at 30, 14, 7, and 1 day as the deadline nears, plus an alert the moment one actually lapses.

Which TLDs are supported?

Any TLD with an official RDAP server in the IANA bootstrap registry — including .com, .net, .org, and .app. Some TLDs such as .io and .co are not yet in the RDAP bootstrap and are not currently supported.

How do the alerts work?

We query each domain's public RDAP record once a day to read its registry expiration date and email you escalating reminders at 60, 30, 14, 7, and 1 day out. Alerts are best-effort reminders; you remain responsible for renewing your domains.

What does it cost and can I get a refund?

Domain Watchdog is $49 per month, cancel anytime, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Email support@domainwatchdog.app within 30 days of your first charge for a full refund.

How to track 50+ client domains' expiration dates (without a spreadsheet)

When you manage five domains, a calendar reminder is fine. At fifty, across a dozen registrars, with renewal dates that quietly shift every time a client moves a domain — the manual approach stops being a system and becomes a liability. Here's why it breaks, and what actually holds.

The failure mode nobody warns you about

Here's the trap that catches good agencies: the registrar does send a renewal reminder — it just doesn't send it to you. It goes to the registrant's inbox, which is the client. Often that's an address nobody monitors, a founder who's moved on, or a spam folder. The card on file expired six months ago. Nobody acted, because the one person who got the email wasn't the one who runs the site.

You — the agency on the hook for that site staying up — were never on the thread. You find out the way the client does: the site is a parking page and the phone is ringing. It was never your renewal to make, but it's squarely your competence on the line.

Why the spreadsheet doesn't scale

It's only as current as the last person who updated it. A domain transfers registrars, the renewal date shifts, and the sheet is now lying to you. Stale data feels like safety, which is worse than no data.
It assumes someone looks. A row that says “expires Aug 13” does nothing if no human opens the file on Aug 6. The spreadsheet doesn't reach out; you have to remember to consult it.
Registrar dashboards fragment the picture. Each one shows only its own domains. With clients spread across GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, Google/Squarespace and three others, there is no single screen that shows everything — so there's no single source of truth.
Auto-renew is a comfort, not a guarantee. It's only as good as the card on file, and an expired client card is the single most common cause of a silent lapse.

What a reliable system actually needs

To track many client domains without a spreadsheet, the system has to do three things the spreadsheet can't:

Read the authoritative source itself. Not a date you typed in once — the live expiry from each domain's registry record, checked automatically. The modern way to read that is RDAP, the structured successor to WHOIS, so it stays correct even when a domain moves registrars.
Reach out to you, not wait to be checked. The alert has to land in your inbox, on a schedule, getting louder as the deadline nears — so a renewal can't fall through just because nobody opened a file.
Cover every registrar in one place. One list, all clients, every TLD — because querying the registry sidesteps the per-registrar login problem entirely.

Try it on one domain right now

Before you trust anything with your whole client list, see the data for yourself. check any client domain's expiry, free — you'll get the exact expiration date and days remaining, read straight from the registry. It's the same source a proper monitor checks every day.

…or stop tracking by hand entirely

Checking fifty domains by hand every week is its own silent failure waiting to happen. Domain Watchdog does it for you: paste in every client domain once, and we run a daily RDAP check and email you — the agency — escalating alerts at 60, 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before any of them expire, plus the moment one lapses. One list, all clients, every registrar. The wedge in one sentence: registrars remind the client; we remind the agency, before it's too late.