Yup, absolutely — you see a lot of the larger brokers do some genre of lease-to-own program (pay us the purchase price plus a near-usurious APY over 24mos and at the end, you can keep the domain.)
My margins are solid and there aren't a lot of competing opportunities to deploy capital besides pulling forward cloud costs or hiring folks (which is a very different value prop altogether), so reasoning about the lump sum was pretty easy, but you're definitely right in that objectively speaking I should have just gotten a line of credit and amortized it that way.
Thanks for sharing your insights and experiences! I am a fan of bootstrapped SaaS, just keep it going as much as you can and avoid the temptation to sell early, although I am sure that opportunity will present itself.
My margins are solid and there aren't a lot of competing opportunities to deploy capital besides pulling forward cloud costs or hiring folks (which is a very different value prop altogether), so reasoning about the lump sum was pretty easy, but you're definitely right in that objectively speaking I should have just gotten a line of credit and amortized it that way.