Quick pitch: I've been building a new domain search tool called Lean Domain Search [1] that makes it really, really easy to find great available .com domain names. You type in a word and it pairs it with 1,400 other words and instantly shows you which are available (and I'm adding 100 results per week). The number of available search results is now almost at 700.
Unless you are dead-set on having a specific name, there's no reason you should have to pay more than the $12 registration fee to pick up a decent domain name for your next site.
I'd even go so far as to say that as word of Lean Domain Search spreads (it's less than 5 weeks old), it will have a major impact on the premium domain name market for this very reason. There's this perceived scarcity of good domain names that simply doesn't exist. You just need a tool like LDS to show you.
I used LDS recently when picking out a domain. It was good, but the results often felt a SEO-like (e.g. "bestof<x>"). I found I was doing a lot of manual work separating the wheat from the chaff.
I ended up creating a text file of base words, prefixes and suffixes (built partially from LDS suggestions) which I fed through another site that combined them into domains I could query in batches of 225.
I felt this was something your site could have easily automated by letting me flag prefixes/suffixes I liked and allowing me to suggest multiple base words.
lds is a good tool and I've just used it to recommend names to people last week.
That said selling names to startups is only one channel for domain names. So I wouldn't say the impact is going to "major".
Also mainstream name buyers tend to search through premium domains at godaddy or type in a name and may see a for sale page that leads to buydomains etc.
Unless you are dead-set on having a specific name, there's no reason you should have to pay more than the $12 registration fee to pick up a decent domain name for your next site.
I'd even go so far as to say that as word of Lean Domain Search spreads (it's less than 5 weeks old), it will have a major impact on the premium domain name market for this very reason. There's this perceived scarcity of good domain names that simply doesn't exist. You just need a tool like LDS to show you.
[1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com