Hello there, I have a .life domain, and it expires tomorrow. I was debating on whether to keep it or not, when I signed in and saw the renewal is 54 bucks. I looked it up online. I found a list with 51 providers, and .life domains range from a 13 dollar renewal with Amazon at the cheapest end, to $99.69 with ‘iwantmyname’, 95.98 with ghandi.net, and 53.83 with Euro DNS as the top 3 most expensive. 2 sites do not support .life tlds.
All 46 of the other sites that can renew these TLDs are 52.17, and below. I am a bit surprised that this service for self-hosters would rank the 3rd place most expensive of the bunch. Any insights you can provide into why this is the case? Aside from this, really enjoyed supporting your simpler tool, but at this price it is hard to justify it.
We use a pretty simple calculation for what we charge for domains. It’s the Stripe cost (currently 0.03USD + 0.029USD*price) plus 0.20*price, where price is what name.com charges us.
Honestly, we’re not really interested in competing on domain price. It’s a very low margin business. We’re competing by offering services no one else has, like a clean, fast UX, no upselling, a simple, open OAuth2 API for making DNS changes, etc.
One thing you’ll have noticed is that domain registrars like to trick you into buying a cool TLD like .life cheap for the first year, then they kill you on the renewals. We originally did this too by passing through name.com’s prices for the first year. We recently changed it so we always charge the renewal price, even the first year. This helps us make quite a bit more money the first year when people do want a fancy TLD, but it also makes it very obvious to them what the long-term cost is.
My recommendation (even if you go with a different registrar) is to let your .life domain expire and switch to a .com, .net, or .org. Even if the domain ends up longer, the prices are way better and more stable, and you’re far less likely to have issues with the domain.
We’ve actually considered dropping support for any domains other than .com/.net/.org, because the practices around most of the others are so scammy.