Press & citations

The cheapest .com renewal we have verified is $10.18 a year at Spaceship, all in. The dearest of the 6 registrars whose .com prices we verify is Hover at $18.99 — a spread of $8.81 a year for an identical domain at an identical registry. Across a hundred domains that is $1018.00 against $1899.00 a year.

Method: Read from each registrar's own published pricing page on 2026-08-19. All-in, including any fee a registrar itemises separately.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#cheapest-com-renewal

Of 864 verified price rows, 653 (76%) charge less in the first year than at renewal, and only 203 (23%) are flat. The advertised price is therefore the exception rather than the rule as a guide to what a domain costs to keep.

Method: Every row where the first-year price is at least one cent below the renewal price, across 864 rows verified at 6 registrars.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#promotional-pricing-is-the-norm

Among the 247 extensions sold by three or more registrars we verify, 149 (60%) have no seller that prices them flat. For those extensions a buyer cannot avoid a promotional first year by shopping around — the pricing shape is set by the registry's own wholesale structure, not by the registrar.

Method: Extensions with at least three verified sellers, none of whom charge the same price in year one as at renewal.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#no-flat-option

The largest gap between a first-year price and a renewal in our verified data is .shop at Namecheap: $0.98 to register, $48.98 to renew — 50.0 times as much, every year after the first.

Method: Highest renewal-to-first-year ratio across all verified rows, checked 2026-08-19.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#steepest-promotional-cliff

Verisign's wholesale .com price sat at $7.85 from 2012 under a price freeze. Since 2021 it has risen in every permitted year and stands at $10.26 today — 1.31× the frozen price. Registrars pay that on every .com they sell, which sets a floor under retail pricing no registrar can undercut. A further increase to $10.97 has been announced with effect from 2026-11-01; it is not yet in force and is not included in the figure above.

Method: Verisign and ICANN registry-agreement announcements, recorded in data/com-wholesale-history.json with the effective date of each change.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#com-wholesale-rise

For 43 of the 60 countries we cover, not one registrar whose prices we verify sells any of that country's ccTLDs — a local or specialist registrar is the only route. The gap is invisible on a price comparison, because the extension simply never appears.

Method: Countries where no ccTLD in our country records has a verified price row from any registrar we check.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#cctld-access-gap

Binky Moon, LLC is the IANA-recorded operator for 148 of the 287 extensions we track — 52% of them. Extension choice looks like a wide market and is, at the registry layer, considerably more concentrated than it appears.

Method: Grouping every tracked TLD by the exact "TLD Manager" string in IANA's root database.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#registry-concentration

We hold prices read from the registrar's own published pages for 6 of the 23 registrars we track, covering 283 extensions and 864 price rows. The other 17 are facts-only entries, and nothing on this site ranks an unverified price against a verified one.

Method: Count of registrars whose pricing carries a verified status, as published at https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/data/verification-status.json.

Cite: https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/press/#verification-coverage