Why DropScope exists
Most expired-domain tools dump raw metrics on you and expect you to figure it out. We translate them into a single DropScore and a plain-language verdict.
If you've ever tried to buy an expired domain, you've seen the same pattern: dozens of numbers — DA, TF, CF, spam score, anchor diversity — across half a dozen tabs, and you still don't really know whether the domain is safe. DropScope was built to answer that one question directly: is this domain worth buying, or is it risky? Everything we ship is in service of making that answer fast, honest, and well-reasoned.
How we compute the DropScore
Five sub-scores combine into a single 0–100 number with explicit weights — no black-box magic.
The DropScore is a weighted blend of authority (30%), spam risk (25%), archive quality (15%), backlink quality (15%), and brand safety (15%). Each sub-score is computed from public signals using deterministic rules you can audit. The score range maps to classifications: 81–100 premium, 61–80 good, 31–60 suspicious, 0–30 spammy. When a sub-score is missing — say, the Wayback Machine times out — we record that explicitly rather than pretending the value is zero.
What "free tier" means for DropScope
Our reactive analysis pipeline costs us roughly $0/month at current volume because we stand on top of free APIs.
Today DropScope uses Google Safe Browsing (100k checks/day free) for reputation, OpenPageRank (1k checks/day free) for authority, the Internet Archive's CDX API for history, and public RDAP for WHOIS. The plain-language summary uses our own Azure deployment of gpt-4o. As volume grows we'll layer in paid providers (Spamhaus DQS, Majestic Pro, Common Crawl Webgraph ingest) — but only when the unit economics make sense, not for marketing.