Domain Portfolio Monitor — Expiry & WHOIS Change Alerts

Watch a list of domains and get told when something important changes: the registration is about to expire, the registrar changed, the nameservers moved, or a status flag appeared.

Built on RDAP, the open successor to WHOIS. No API key, no account, no rate-limit configuration.

What it detects

Signal	Why it matters
Expiry approaching	The single most common cause of accidental outages and lost domains
Registrar change	An unexpected transfer can mean a hijack
Nameserver change	DNS takeover, or a migration you were not told about
Status flags	clientHold, pendingDelete, serverTransferProhibited and friends
DNSSEC toggled	Signing turned on or off
Expiry date moved	Confirms a renewal actually happened

Typical uses

• Never lose a domain to silent expiry across a portfolio you did not personally register
• Watch client or subsidiary domains you manage but do not control
• Detect hijacks early by alerting on registrar or nameserver change
• Verify that auto-renew actually renewed
• Track competitor or acquisition-target domains

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
domains	array	—	Required. Domains to watch. Full URLs and www. prefixes are cleaned automatically.
alertDaysBeforeExpiry	integer	30	Flag expiringSoon when expiry falls inside this window.
onlyReportChanges	boolean	false	Return a domain only if something changed or it is expiring soon.
concurrency	integer	5	Parallel lookups.
stateName	string	domain-monitor-state	Named store holding each domain's previous snapshot.

{
  "domains": ["github.com", "wikipedia.org", "example.co.uk"],
  "alertDaysBeforeExpiry": 30,
  "onlyReportChanges": true
}

Output

{
  "domain": "github.com",
  "isFirstCheck": false,
  "expiration": "2026-10-09T07:00:00Z",
  "daysUntilExpiry": 53,
  "expiringSoon": false,
  "registrar": "MarkMonitor Inc.",
  "status": ["client delete prohibited", "client transfer prohibited"],
  "nameservers": ["dns1.p08.nsone.net", "dns2.p08.nsone.net"],
  "dnssec": false,
  "changeCount": 1,
  "changes": [
    { "field": "nameservers",
      "from": ["ns1.old.net"],
      "to": ["dns1.p08.nsone.net", "dns2.p08.nsone.net"] }
  ],
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-17T11:02:44.108Z"
}

The first run for a domain records a baseline, so changes is empty and isFirstCheck is true. From the second run onward you get real diffs.

Recommended setup

Attach an Apify Schedule and run it daily with onlyReportChanges: true. Quiet days return an empty dataset, so ongoing monitoring stays cheap, and anything that does come back is worth reading.

Pricing

A small per-run charge covers the check, then a small charge per domain returned. With onlyReportChanges enabled, a day where nothing moved returns nothing and costs only the run charge.

Notes and limitations

• A handful of TLDs do not publish RDAP yet (.io is a notable example). Those return an error record rather than failing the run. In changes-only mode a repeated identical error is reported once, not on every run, so an unsupported TLD will not quietly bill you forever.
• Nameservers and status values are normalised (lowercased, sorted, trailing dots stripped) so cosmetic registry differences are not reported as changes.
• Registrant contact details are redacted by registries under GDPR and are deliberately not returned.