Starting a company in 2026 means discovering that almost every good domain disappeared years ago. After a series of compromises, one painful near miss and months of waiting, we finally secured redbricks.ca.
Starting a new company in 2026 comes with a simple problem: all the good domains are gone.
The clean .com, .ca and .io variations of almost any good brand were registered years ago. redbricks.com, for example, was first registered in 2001. That was 25 years before we started looking.
When we began building Red Bricks, we used redbricksdata.com. It was not our ideal domain, but it was the .com we could get. It also made sense for Red Bricks Data, the API product we were building at the time.
So we built everything around it. Our website, email and infrastructure all lived there.
The problem was that Red Bricks was becoming more than a data company.
The domain stopped fitting the company
As Red Bricks OS became a core part of the business, having "data" in the primary domain started to feel increasingly wrong.
It was a great name for the API, but it did not represent the operating system. It felt like one product had accidentally become the name of the entire company.
This was not a major operational problem. Everything worked. People could find us. But it kept nagging at us because we knew we did not have the right home for the brand.
That led to an almost daily ritual of checking GoDaddy, trying different combinations and looking at increasingly awkward alternatives. Every good option seemed to be unavailable, overpriced or just not quite right.
Eventually, we were able to secure redbricks.dev.
It was clean, short and much closer to what we wanted. For a brief period, it became our home.
But as it became clear that Red Bricks OS would be our flagship product, .dev started to feel too developer-focused. It worked well for Red Bricks Data, but once again it did not describe the whole company.
The one that got away
While we had redbricks.dev for the API, I started watching redbricks.app as a possible home for Red Bricks OS.
It felt like the obvious answer. Red Bricks Data could live on .dev, while Red Bricks OS could live on .app.
I watched the domain for a while but kept putting off the decision.
I was in Mexico on a family vacation when I finally decided to buy it. When I went to complete the purchase, I discovered that a company in Korea had bought it just a couple of hours earlier.
It was a gut punch.
I had watched the domain for months, waited too long and missed it by a matter of hours.
In retrospect, losing redbricks.app prevented us from splitting the company across two domains. At the time, it did not feel fortunate. It felt like we had missed our best remaining option.
Then redbricks.ca became possible
In the middle of 2026, we learned that redbricks.ca was approaching renewal.
We started watching it every day.
Anyone who has waited for a domain to expire knows how strange the process is. Nothing appears to happen for a long time. You do not know whether the existing owner will renew it, whether it will actually be released or how many other people are waiting for the same moment.
All you can do is watch, get your bid in and hope.
Eventually, the domain dropped. We entered the process, placed our bid and won it.
After spending so much time assuming the right domain would always be out of reach, Red Bricks finally had the home it was supposed to have.
A small win for a long-term company
At the end of the day, it is just a domain.
It does not make the product better. It does not write code, serve customers or solve any of the difficult problems involved in building a company.
But we are building Red Bricks for the next decade.
We now have one name that can comfortably hold Red Bricks OS, Red Bricks Data and whatever we decide to build next.
A good domain should disappear when someone reads it. People should remember the company, not the workaround in the URL.
Sometimes the small wins matter because they make the larger ambition feel a little more real.
For us, finally landing redbricks.ca was one of those wins.