Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
Registrars advertise year one and earn on year two. A comparison of what a .com actually costs across four popular registrars over five years.
A domain is the rare startup cost with a genuinely identical product behind every price tag: the same .com resolves the same way no matter who registered it. Which makes registrar pricing a clean experiment in how companies charge when the product can’t differ — and the answer is: on the renewal, where nobody is looking.
| Registrar | Year 1 (typical promo) | Renewal / year | 5-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | $10.44 (no promos) | $10.44 flat | ~$52 |
| Porkbun | ~$11 | ~$11 flat | ~$55 |
| Namecheap | from ~$5.98 with code | ~$14–18 | ~$66+ |
| GoDaddy | from ~$0.99–4.99 with code | ~$22.99 | ~$95+ |
The pattern is exact: the deeper the year-one discount, the higher the renewal. GoDaddy’s dollar-domain becomes the most expensive .com in the table by month 13 and stays that way forever. Cloudflare’s boring $10.44 — the registry’s own wholesale fee plus the $0.18 ICANN charge, with zero markup — never changes, which is why it wins any horizon longer than a year.
Sixty dollars over five years won’t break a store. The habit will. Domain pricing is the first of many first-year-promo structures a new merchant meets — apps, email tools, even hosting all use the same shape: acquisition price up front, real price after you’re invested. Domains are simply the cleanest place to learn the rule, because the product is provably identical. Always budget on the renewal, never on the promo — for the domain, and then for everything the store subscribes to after it.
One practical addendum: whichever registrar you choose, turn on WHOIS privacy (free at the registrars in the table) and set the domain to auto-renew with a card that won’t expire silently. Losing a domain to a missed $11 invoice is the most expensive way to save money in ecommerce.
Promotional first-year pricing is a customer-acquisition cost; the renewal is the real price. A .com's wholesale registry fee is the same for every registrar, so everything above roughly $10.44 is the registrar's margin.
Registrars that price at or near registry cost with flat renewals — Cloudflare ($10.44/year flat) and Porkbun (~$11/year) as of 2026. Flat means registration and renewal are the same number, so there is no year-two surprise.
No. The domain resolves identically wherever it is registered. Registrar choice is purely an economic and management decision — pricing, WHOIS privacy, and DNS tooling.