With namecheap, they list as $10, but you can get the price even lower and use the code "SOPASucks"*

* Conditions apply. Conditions also apply.

All of these "conditions apply" kind of makes the point of my argument. For every $8.95 cert offer, there is another offer where you get a free cert by purchasing the domain name, or by transferring from some competitor, or by renewing some existing domain.

It is a true confusopoly. These schemes to extract more money from consumers may be slightly more or less scammy, but ALL domain registrars engage in these practices.

The sad part of it is that in the end, I don't know if I'd be better off being scammed into paying an extra $4/month for some service I'm not using, or being "socially conscious" and paying more to a company that does not pull these tricks, but that can only keep itself in business by charging higher prices.

Price: too high. I am paying $8.49 per .com right now with Fabulous. NameCheap is 10.69 with no coupon. Asking for 12 is too high if I am renewing a lot of domains.

API: A lot of registrars have API access. I am not sure what is special about yours. I've worked with Fabulous, eNom, DirectI, and a couple others. Some are better than others, but what makes you special? In fact, you seem to be built on top of eNom's API.

DNS: This is perhaps the only real selling point I see. You're essentially upselling on better DNS and foregoing all the other potential upsells (like hosting). How do you compete against the professional DNS companies? It only takes a NS change for me to be using their services. You're using Route53, why wouldn't I do this myself?

Maybe I am not your target audience, but I am struggling to figure out who is. I understand the economics of registrars and I feel like you've cut yourself too small a slice to be sustainable. I have doubts about the funding because you don't own a registrar which reduces costs long term but requires quite a bit of capital. But also creates higher pricing requirements which means less customers. You've given up all but one upsell possibility, which has a lot of competition that geeks are generally familiar with. Your audience is supposed to be savvy, so if they are developing a system that requires a lot of domains they can figure out how/where to get them cheaper and setup DNS too most likely.

I like seeing innovation in the domain space, but I fear for the economic viability of this. I also don't honestly see any innovation here. You've complained about what people don't like, but a lot of companies are already going after you main complaints.

I think the registrar innovation is pretty dead because of the shitty economics of it. The margins are getting eaten up by VeriSign every year. They make more money doing everything but registrations. Maybe your DNS upsell will work, maybe not. Good luck.

This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets.

For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in delivering the core user experience — we see none of this margin and the consumer does not see any incremental value from this hike by the registry.

Namecheap stands against removing price caps and allowing these incremental price hikes that only hurt the consumer.

-Ted from Namecheap

I'm sure they could do this more informatively though, but they're not alone in not doing that..

This only makes me more convinced that it’s a bad move.

This won't work. You either have to charge more than people will be willing to pay or sell them things they need (or don't need). You can't make money doing what you are doing.

(Written by an actual ICANN Acredited regitrar..)

I assume they make their money by selling domains and taking a cut of the price. Based on my current registrar's prices, even comparing a single domain (i.e. no bulk discount), this service would be more expensive by:

.org US$7.45 .com US$2.99 .co US$11.63 .net US$6.61 .biz US$7.53

The lack of details (they don't specifically detail which registrars they work with) makes me wonder who would ever sign up for this.

Even if they have a tiny margin on the domain costs, that means that they are probably a loss-making business. So they plan to just sell to Google, Amazon or Microsoft in the future, and we don't yet know which one of those it's going to be?

Even if they had a small margin, does that mean that there's poor quality support, despite domains being mission-critical to businesses?

Why are you paying $35 for domain names? Your site is a .com so it shouldn't be more than $10/year.

But these prices aren't completely unreasonable, they come with (generally quite decent) logos, and they would save a startup countless hours of faffing over domains.

BTW as to your point I totally agree that it should be much cheaper than this. Namecheap at one time had a promotion where they allowed you to register for 10 years for $10 or something. So it's definitely doable and most probably as soft limit by the registrars.

Small typo there, I think you mean $10 a year.

> Making domain registration cheaper would only reduce the price of domain names for people who want to use them.

You don't see how those two statements contradict each other? Make registration $6, now domains that are worth between $6 and $8 will also be namesquatted. Reducing the price of something almost never results in less units sold, it's economics 101.

Have you ever bought a domain from a namesquatter? Did you pay $8 for it? No, you didn't, you paid whatever the seller thought that domain was worth to you, which is a lot more. Nobody namesquats to sell domains for $8 or $20. Yet if Verisign had that domain, you would only have paid $8 for it. That's the difference between squatting, and listing a public price that is the same for everyone and for every domain.

Verisign isn't squatting or ransoming anything no matter how much you may dislike them.

Higher prices cost you money, but keeps the domain sharks a little further away.

Keeping domain sharks away is nice.