Why build another registrar?
The .DE zone is one of the largest country-code TLDs in the world, with more than 17 million registered domains. It is the digital home of the German Mittelstand, of agencies, freelancers, and startups across the country. And yet, for most international registrars, .DE is an afterthought. It sits somewhere in a dropdown between .cyou and .digital, wrapped in confusing pricing, aggressive upsells, and support teams that have never heard of DENIC.
We kept running into this ourselves. At Cloudheed, we build EU-sovereign managed PostgreSQL for companies that care deeply about where their infrastructure lives and who operates it. Our customers ask hard questions about data residency, jurisdiction, and operational transparency. When we looked at the registrar landscape through that same lens, we saw a gap.
If digital sovereignty matters for your database, it should matter for your domain too. The domain is the first layer of your online presence. Everything else, DNS, email, TLS, your entire web identity, hangs off it.
What de.domains offers
Focus. We register and manage .DE domains. That's it. No catalog of 800 TLDs, no distractions. This focus lets us build every part of the product around how .DE actually works, including DENIC-specific requirements and the German market's expectations.
Transparent pricing. The price you see at registration is the price you pay at renewal. No first-year teaser rates that triple in year two. No checkout pages pre-loaded with add-ons you didn't ask for.
Fast, modern tooling. Clean API, sensible DNS management, and a dashboard that gets out of your way. We built the stack the same way we build Cloudheed: boring, reliable technology, operated carefully.
How this fits into Cloudheed
Cloudheed exists because European companies increasingly want their critical infrastructure operated inside the EU, by teams they can actually reach, under laws they understand. We started with managed PostgreSQL because databases are the most sensitive layer of the stack.
de.domains extends the same principle downward, to the foundation. Domain, DNS, database: the pieces of your infrastructure where sovereignty and reliability matter most.
Over time you can expect the two products to work well together. If you run your database on Cloudheed and your domain on de.domains, things like DNS records for your database endpoints, TLS automation, and unified billing are natural next steps.
Try it today
de.domains is live now. Registering a .DE domain takes about a minute.
If you have questions, feedback, or a feature you'd like to see, reach out. We're building this for the German market, and we want to hear from the people in it.