How Riley & Grey solved a key friction point with 4 API calls

At a glance

Riley & Grey is a premium wedding platform built around a simple idea: couples shouldn't need to be technical to have a beautiful, custom online presence. Founded in NYC by Matthew Jones and his co-founders Marissa and Casey, the product was born from a simple observation — existing wedding websites in 2013 were dated and it was hard for couples who cared about design to find suitable website platforms.

Their solution: a guided builder that gives users meaningful personalization with guardrails. You progress through a brief onboarding flow — providing your name, your spouse-to-be's name, your wedding date — and it produces a polished, responsive site. No design decisions required.

But getting that site live required a step that broke the magic: buying a domain.

"Buying domains can be complicated with DNS and nameservers," said Matthew Jones, Riley & Grey's CEO and Co-Founder. "We decided to work with a partner, and part of your subscription with us is that we buy the domain for you."

Why name.com

Matthew said he found name.com "probably just a Google search for 'domain registration API.’” Riley & Grey has been building on the name.com API since 2013, and over a decade of consistent, reliable performance later, they're still here.

Matt said what's kept Riley & Grey on name.con is:

• Reliability — the API has been so consistent that domains don't become a support issue
• Stability across versions — backwards compatibility maintained from v1 all the way through to the newest version, Core
• Responsive support on edge cases — when TLD-specific parameters aren't clear in the docs, or there's a question about the integration, the name.com team is quick to respond.

(Other registrars) keep trying to steal us from you guys, and I keep telling them to go pound sand. They're just not competitive.

The integration

Riley & Grey built their entire domain experience around four API calls.

1. Bulk availability search — Each query checks up to 30 domain permutations based on the couple's names, wedding year, and detected geolocation — surfacing localized options like .co.uk for UK visitors, with a perceived response time under one second. The year logic adapts: early in the calendar year it suggests the current year; later, it assumes the couple is planning ahead.

2. One-step purchase with Whois privacy — Domains are registered with Whois privacy on by default. Whois privacy is included free with all name.com domains so no additional cost is passed through to the user.

3. Renewal tied to subscription lifecycle — As long as a customer maintains their Riley & Grey subscription, their domain renews automatically.

4. Nameserver updates + graceful retirement — Nameservers are automatically configured at purchase. When a site is retired, the domain is parked with name.com nameservers and a page that reads, in Matthew's words: "The event is over, the DJ has gone home, it's been a great celebration." The page links back to Riley & Grey, turning every retired site into a passive word-of-mouth touchpoint.

Dev stack: Riley & Grey runs on Rails with ~2,000 automated tests. They use the VCR gem to record sandbox API responses, enabling fast, safe iteration without hitting live servers during test runs. Their recent name.com API v4 → Core migration took roughly two hours — interface parity made it nearly mechanical.

"Given our extensive test suite and name.com's sandbox environment, it was very quick and easy for us to change our API integration touch points, validate against the sandbox, capture responses, and deploy to production, " Matthew said.

Riley & Grey's Results

• Instant availability: Domain search returns in under one second across up to 30 permutations — fast enough to feel native to the UI.
• Operational simplicity: Whois privacy is standard on every registration. Renewal is lifecycle-aware, tied to subscription status rather than a calendar date.
• Scale and stability: Domain reliability rarely surfaces as a customer support issue.
• International growth: A few years ago, 90% of Riley & Grey's customers were in the US. Today it's 65% North America, 35% international — and that international cohort is particularly privacy-conscious. Context-aware ccTLD prioritization and default WHOIS privacy are core to serving them well.

Working with the name.com team

The domain industry is a patchwork of registries, each with their own requirements. .CO.UK contact fields, .US nexus requirements — certain TLDs have unique parameters. When Riley & Grey hits one of those edges, they have a direct line to the name.com team.

The feedback loop goes both ways — when Riley & Grey flagged an oddity in Whois privacy behavior, the issue was routed directly to name.com's product leads and engineering team. For a lean, founder-operated team like Riley & Grey, that kind of direct access matters. There's no ticket queue between them and the people who can actually fix things.

What's next for Riley & Grey's domain integration

• Premium TLD upsells — rolling out .wedding, .wed, and .vip as flagged "Premium" suggestions with a transparent $49 add-on, testing whether some couples are willing to pay for a premium domain upgrade
• Privacy-first email — exploring a bundled email product for couples who want a dedicated address for wedding correspondence; the international market's GDPR awareness makes this a natural fit
• Broader ccTLD coverage — pursuing .ca and .com.au to improve conversion with Canadian and Australian customers, where a local domain meaningfully signals trust.
  

The ability to instantly offer personalized domain suggestions to our couples eliminates a key friction to publishing a website in 2026: finding a quality domain name that is available for use.

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