Getting your domain back when someone else controls it
A former developer, an old agency, a founder who left. The recovery path depends on which.
Domain control is the root of nearly everything else — email, authentication, certificates, recovery for other services. When it sits with someone outside the company, that is not an inconvenience, it is an existential dependency on a relationship that may already have ended.
First, establish what you actually control
Look up the registrar and check whether the administrative contact is an address you can receive mail at. Then check where the nameservers point, because the registrar and the DNS host are often different companies and you may control one but not the other.
It is common to discover you control the DNS but not the registration, which means you can change records but cannot stop the domain expiring.
If it is an agency or freelancer, ask before escalating
Most of the time this is not adversarial. Small agencies register domains on behalf of clients as a convenience and are perfectly willing to transfer them. Ask for an authorisation code and unlock, in writing, with a deadline.
Keep the request specific: transfer the registration to a company-controlled account, not merely add you as a user on theirs. Being a user on someone else's account is the situation you are trying to leave.
If the relationship has broken down
Registrars have dispute processes, and they turn on documentary proof: company registration matching the registrant name, invoices showing you paid for it, correspondence establishing the arrangement. Collect those before you open the case rather than during it.
Where the registrant name is the other party's company rather than yours, this is harder and is genuinely a legal question rather than a technical one.
While you are locked out, reduce the blast radius
If the domain is used for email and authentication, every day of lost control is a day where a lapse takes down more than a website. Where possible, move authentication to an identity provider that does not depend on that domain for recovery, and make sure at least one administrator account uses an unrelated address.
Afterwards, make it structural
Company-owned registrar account. Company-controlled billing. Registrar lock on. Auto-renew on, with a payment method that will not expire quietly. Two administrators. Expiry date in a calendar that someone actually reads.
The whole exercise takes an afternoon once, and prevents a category of problem that is disproportionately expensive to solve later.