DomainGuard for nonprofits
Most of the year a website problem is an inconvenience. During an appeal it is the appeal. DomainGuard watches the pieces that decide whether donors reach you and whether email from you is believed — domain expiry, certificates, DNS, mail authentication, uptime and lookalike domains — and the plan that covers all of it costs nothing.
DomainGuard is in a public TestFlight beta and is not on the App Store yet. The web dashboard is live, and the free plan needs no card.
Three ways giving stops
Two are administrative and one is criminal, and all three show up first as donors quietly not completing a gift.
The quiet one
The browser stops showing your donation page and starts showing a full-screen warning about it. Donors do not troubleshoot, they close the tab. Certificate expiry is checked per host, and the warning arrives while there is still time to renew.
The expensive one
ICANN's expired-registration policy requires registrars to disrupt DNS before deleting a name, specifically so a broken site gets your attention. By then the renewal notice has been bouncing at an address on the domain that stopped working. Registrar expiry is read from the public record and alerted off-domain.
The one that costs donors money
Not to build a website. To send email. A donor gets a message from an address one letter off yours saying the wire instructions changed, and the address looks close enough to be checked and accepted. The lookalike watch finds those registrations and scores whether they can receive mail.
Before the year-end appeal
Every one of these runs on the free plan, on demand, on every domain you own. It is an afternoon once a year rather than a subscription decision.
If you would rather not create an account first, the free domain checkup covers the mail-authentication half of this list from a single box, and the lookalike domain check covers the impersonation half.
What it costs, honestly
Nobody is served by a free plan described in a way that hides where it stops, so here is where it stops.
It does not expire, it needs no card, and it holds every domain you own. Every health module runs on demand: DNS, certificates, mail authentication, uptime, blacklists, security headers, the website scan, the vulnerability scanner, tech detection and the compliance tracker. It is ad supported.
The watching. On the free plan you run the checks; nothing re-runs them nightly and no email arrives when something changes. Free does keep a five-minute uptime probe on three domains, one monitored address for breach exposure, and KEV and CVE alerts.
Starter is $6.99 a month, or $69.99 for the year. It buys the nightly re-scan on 25 domains, email alerts, DMARC report ingestion, SEO and accessibility scanning, and PDF reports for the board packet. Plans are bought through the iPhone app.
Above Starter the plans are built for people managing dozens or hundreds of domains — Pro at $49.99 a month adds the local SEO suite and read access over the API, and Enterprise at $99.99 adds hourly scanning. Most nonprofits never need either.
The practical questions
Yes. Expiry, nameservers, certificates and mail authentication all come from public records — DNS, RDAP and certificate transparency — so DomainGuard can monitor a domain you do not hold the login for. That is the domain most likely to lapse, so it is the one most worth adding. The deeper active scans do require proving control, which needs access; the health checks do not.
No, and neither can anyone who offers to do it cheaply. Getting a domain suspended means a complaint to its registrar with evidence attached, or a UDRP filing. What DomainGuard does is find the registration, record what it can prove — the DNS records, the mail records, the registry data, whether the page copies yours — and hand you the evidence to file with.
Yes, because the parts that fail are still yours. The domain that points at the platform, the certificate on the subdomain you set up for it, the DNS record that routes donors there, and the email address on your letterhead are all your records, not the platform's. DomainGuard watches those. It does not process donations or touch the platform.
There is no separate nonprofit rate. The free plan is the answer for most small organizations, and it is generous on purpose: an inventory you have to pay to complete is an inventory nobody completes. If you want the automation, Starter is $6.99 a month.
NHM LLC, a managed IT and cybersecurity company in Northeast Ohio. DomainGuard is our product. If a finding turns into work you would rather hand off, we do that too — that side is on our nonprofit IT page.
Ten minutes, no card
The free plan holds every domain your organization owns. The iPhone app is in a public TestFlight beta, free to join, and signs in with the same account.
