Every portfolio holder has a transfer story. Mine usually starts with a registrar I stopped liking — a price hike, a worse control panel, whatever — and ends with me staring at my domain list, doing the math on the one-by-one click dance. You know the one. Open the domain. Manage. Get EPP code. Copy. Next. Some registrars let you export the whole list in one shot. The good ones do. The ones that don’t? That’s not a missing feature. That’s friction as a retention strategy.

So here’s the workaround, via Andrew Allemann at Domain Name Wire this week: hand the clicking to Claude. Install the Claude Chrome extension, log into your registrar panel, and switch to CoWork mode. Then give it a dead-simple prompt — which domains, which clicks, where to put the codes. Claude drives your browser, walks each domain’s manage screen, grabs the EPP code, and drops every one of them into a spreadsheet. The worst chore of a registrar move shrinks to an afternoon.

The prompt, roughly “I have the registrar page [URL] open. I need to get the EPP code for each of the domains. This requires clicking on the three dots next to each domain, clicking ‘Manage Domain’, then clicking ‘Get EPP Code’. Please copy the EPP for each domain and put it in a sheet.”

Batch them. Forty or fifty domains a run is the sweet spot — one hiccup doesn’t torpedo the whole batch, and you can hand Claude a named subset of your portfolio if you only want to move part of it. I run 66 names myself, so believe me when I say the math on this is personal. The manual version is the kind of tedium you keep postponing, which is exactly why the friction works. “Write one prompt, watch it go” changes whether you bother switching at all — and that changes the leverage.

40–50 Domains per batch. Small enough that one failure doesn’t wipe the run; big enough that a full portfolio clears in a couple of passes. Source: Domain Name Wire, Sep 16 2026

A few ground rules if you’re going to do this. One — be exact in the prompt. Name the domains or the subset, spell out the click path. Two — eyeball the spreadsheet against your domain list before you submit a single transfer. One wrong code and you’re debugging instead of moving. Three — don’t let the panel auto-log you out mid-run. Stay signed in, stay nearby. This is an AI driving your account, which is fine for grabbing codes, but it’s your name on the account if something goes sideways.

Now the bigger point, the meta one. The registrar business has quietly relied on switching being annoying for a decade. Bulk EPP export was the polite request; this is the impolite answer. When the cost of leaving drops to near zero, the only registrars that keep your names are the ones that deserve them. Price, panel, support — that’s the shortlist now. Friction isn’t on it anymore.

And if your registrar is one of the ones that still won’t do bulk export? Ask yourself what else they’re hoping you won’t get around to.