No more writing shitty regexes to police usernames
Every product that allows usernames eventually ships the same broken solution. Someone adds a blacklist. Then a regex. Then another regex copied from StackOverflow. It works just long enough to ship, and then `admin`, `support`, city names, brand impersonation, and obvious slurs start leaking through anyway. Everyone knows it’s fragile, but it gets ignored because "it’s just usernames". I’ve had to rebuild this logic across multiple products, and I got tired of pretending it’s a solved problem. So I built *username.dev*, an API that answers a more useful question than "is this taken?" — it…
No more writing shitty regexes to police usernames launched on December 24, 2025 with 19 votes, #595 of 11,628 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Username.dev is an API that validates usernames by classifying them into categories such as brands, public figures, places, system-reserved terms, dictionary words, premium handles, and offensive content. Rather than simply checking availability, it returns structured metadata to help developers make informed decisions about which usernames to allow. The tool addresses the common problem of homemade username validation systems that rely on fragile blacklists and regex patterns that frequently fail to catch reserved terms, impersonation risks, and inappropriate content.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Every product that allows usernames eventually ships the same broken solution. Someone adds a blacklist. Then a regex. Then another regex copied from StackOverflow. It works just long enough to ship, and then `admin`, `support`, city names, brand impersonation, and obvious slurs start leaking through anyway. Everyone…
Does a similar job
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Context.devJul 2026 · context.dev · ▲814Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.
- UCusernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability2013 · usernique.com · ▲31
Get any domain's brand data via API2024 · brand.dev · ▲32Context.dev is a web scraping API for AI agents: scrape any URL into LLM-ready Markdown, crawl entire sites, and extract structured data with one REST API.
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