Domduck vs FrogDR

FrogDR and Domduck do the same core job: read a domain rating on a schedule and keep the numbers so you can see the shape. FrogDR started first and has more people on it. This page says what the differences are, with the date each claim was read.

Everything below about FrogDR came from frogdr.com on 2026-08-03. The method is at the bottom.

What FrogDR does better

Six things, and none of them is on the Domduck roadmap this year.

• Backlinks and referring domains. Their $5 plan shows both. Domduck has no backlink data at all, because the free Ahrefs endpoint returns one number and nothing else.
• A leaderboard and a public directory. Paid accounts enter both. That is a real reason to stay, and it is a distribution loop Domduck does not have.
• Goals and milestone emails. Their free plan sets a target rating and tells you when you pass it. Domduck sends one daily digest and nothing else.
• Four readings a day on the paid plan, against one a day here.
• Years of collected history. They have been recording since before Domduck existed. Nobody can backfill a rating series, so their head start is real and permanent for the domains they already watch.
• Two do-follow backlinks per domain on the paid plan, from their directory.

If those matter to you, their $5 plan is a fair price and this page is not an argument against paying it.

The differences, measured

The FrogDR column comes from their pricing page, their homepage and their robots.txt. A "no" means the feature is not listed on any of those pages, not that it cannot be found somewhere inside the product.

The cap is the reason Domduck exists

FrogDR's free tier holds 6 domains and the paid tier holds 12. Domduck was built because 12 was not enough for one person's own portfolio, and the fix was to remove the cap rather than to price the next tier.

That is affordable because of what the numbers cost. Every source Domduck reads is free to query: the rating endpoint, the Tranco list, RDAP, the certificate handshake, DNS, and the site's own robots.txt. One more domain on your list adds about nothing to the bill, so a cap could only exist to sell you its removal. Why it is free has the whole argument, including the point where the free model breaks.

The ten-day rule

This footnote is on FrogDR's own pricing page, under the free plan:

If you do not visit your dashboard for more than 10 days, your domains' DR may stop updating until your next visit.

And under it:

If a website is abandonned, its DR will update once a month.

That is an honest disclosure and it is worth reading twice, because it inverts what a tracker is for. A tracker exists so that you do not have to look. A series that stops when you stop looking has a hole exactly where you were not paying attention, which is the period you most want the record of.

Domduck's sweep runs server-side against the least recently read domains. It does not know whether you signed in, and a quiet month produces the same rows as a busy one.

Unchecked is not unchanged

Both products draw a line through time, and the difference is what the line does when nobody read the value that day.

Domduck writes one row per check and draws a gap when there is no row. A gap means nobody looked. A carried-forward value is drawn dashed, so it never pretends to be a reading. That distinction is the reason the ten-day rule above matters: a chart that fills its own holes cannot tell you it has any.

How Domduck reads a domain is the full version, including why the sweep writes a row on days when nothing moved.

What Domduck records that a rating tracker does not

The rating is one column. The rest of the public record moves too, and it is all free to read:

• AI crawler policy, for 8 agents, in three states rather than two, with the date each verdict changed. Nobody else keeps this history. See AI crawlers.
• llms.txt, present or absent, on the same daily pass.
• Registration, through RDAP rather than WHOIS, which most of the industry is still parsing.
• Certificate expiry, issuer and subject names.
• DNS records, and what changed between two days.
• Popularity rank from the Tranco list, which is the research-grade replacement for Alexa rank.

What FrogDR sells that is not FrogDR

Their Grow page lists paid growth services with FrogDR discount codes: directory submissions from $29 to $79, a media-placement package from $389, and three monthly SEO and lead products. Those are other companies' products and other companies' prices. FrogDR is the referrer, not the seller.

That is a normal way for a small product to make money and it is not a criticism. It is here because the packages get quoted in reviews as if FrogDR charged $389 for a service, and that is not what the page says.

Which one to use

Use FrogDR if you want backlink counts, a leaderboard, goals and milestone emails, and 12 domains is enough. It costs $5 a month and it does that job.

Use Domduck if you run more domains than a cap allows, if you want the rest of the public record beside the rating, or if you want a series that keeps recording while you are not looking.

Use both if you already have years of FrogDR history. Nobody can backfill a rating series, so the sensible move is to keep the old record running and start the second one today rather than to switch and lose the first.

Method

Every FrogDR claim on this page was read on 2026-08-03 from frogdr.com/pricing, frogdr.com, frogdr.com/grow, frogdr.com/robots.txt and frogdr.com/sitemap.xml, with a browser user agent. Quoted lines are verbatim, spelling included.

Two claims that circulate and are wrong: their free tier is 6 domains, not 3, and sitemap.xml returned 404 rather than a redirect. Their robots.txt is one group, User-agent: * with an empty Disallow:, which allows everything and names no AI agent. Under Domduck's own three-state model that reads as *unspecified* for all 8 agents, not *allowed*.

This page is re-checked every quarter. If something here is out of date, write to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) and it gets fixed with a new date rather than quietly.