Press & citations

The cheapest .com renewal we have verified is $10.18 a year at Spaceship, all in. The dearest of the 11 registrars whose .com prices we verify is Gandi at $38.38: a spread of $28.20 a year for an identical domain at an identical registry. Across a hundred domains that is $1018.00 against $3838.00 a year.

Method: Read from each registrar's own published pricing page on 2026-09-02. All-in, including any fee a registrar itemises separately.

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

Of 2448 verified price rows, 1622 (66%) charge less in the first year than at renewal, and only 818 (33%) 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 2448 rows verified at 11 registrars.

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

Among the 281 extensions sold by three or more registrars we verify, 4 (1%) 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 .store at Gandi: $1.99 to register, $159.98 to renew: 80.4 times as much, every year after the first.

Method: Highest renewal-to-first-year ratio across all verified rows, checked 2026-09-28.

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 31 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 11 of the 23 registrars we track, covering 295 extensions and 2448 price rows. The other 12 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