The .com renewal trap: what a domain really costs in year two

Domain pricing has a bait-and-switch problem, and it is not a scandal — it is just how the market is built. Registrars sell the first year of a domain at or near cost (sometimes at a loss) to win the signup, and recover the money on the renewal, which you will pay every year for as long as you keep the name. The result: two sites that charge the same on day one can end up costing wildly different amounts by year five.

This page does the arithmetic the marketing pages leave out. Every figure below is taken from OneYearDeal's live price database, cross-checked against tld-list.org's registrar comparison tables (checked 7 October 2026). All prices are US dollars per year unless marked otherwise.

.com: the first year is not the price

The classic .com price spread, right now, looks like this:

| Registrar | First year | Renewal | |---|---|---| | Cloudflare | $10.46 | $10.46 | | Dynadot | $10.88 | $10.88 | | Porkbun | $11.08 | $11.08 | | NameSilo | $11.05 | $11.05 | | Namecheap | $10.98 | $18.48 | | GoDaddy | ~$13 | ~$23 |

Read that middle column twice. Cloudflare and Dynadot charge the same price you paid in year one, forever. Namecheap charges roughly 70% more to renew than to register. GoDaddy's renewal is nearly double its first-year price. On day one those are all "about $11" domains; in year two they are not.

Our own database shows the same shape at Namecheap ($8.27 first year for .com, $13.92 renewal on our recorded price) and Cloudflare ($10.44 flat, renewal equal to registration). Cloudflare famously sells at wholesale cost with no markup — which is exactly why its renewal and its first-year price are identical.

Five-year cost of a .com

Register a .com for five years and renew it four times, and the total bill splits like this:

• Cloudflare or Dynadot: roughly $10.46–$10.88 × 5 ≈ $52–$54
• Namecheap: $10.98 + 4 × $18.48 ≈ $84.90
• GoDaddy: around $13 + 4 × $23 ≈ $105

Same domain, same registry, same ICANN fee — a doubling of lifetime cost based on where you checked out. That is the trap: people compare the checkout page, not the fifth year.

.net and .org have the same disease

The pattern repeats across the older gTLDs. For .net, Cloudflare, Dynadot and Porkbun all renew at the same price they register ($11.86, $12.52 and $12.52 respectively at the time of checking), while Namecheap's renewal ($18.58) runs nearly 50% above its first year. For .org the gap is steeper still: Namecheap renews at $15.98 against a $7.48 first year — more than double.

In our own recorded prices, Dynadot's .org shows $7.99 first year against an $11.64 renewal, and its .net is a flat $12.52/$12.52 — again, the registrar that renews at the registration price wins the long game.

.io: where the spread gets brutal

The .io extension is the extreme case. First-year prices cluster around $28–$35, but renewals range from $50 (Cloudflare, flat) to $53.50 (Dynadot) to $69.89 (NameSilo) to $75.98 (Namecheap) — plus GoDaddy around $60. Our database shows the same: a $26.35 first year at Namecheap renewing into $57.23, a $38.99 first year at NameSilo with a $69.99 recorded renewal.

That is a name you might buy for $29 that costs $76 a year to keep. If you are budgeting a startup's domain portfolio, the renewal — not the teaser — is the number that matters.

The four rules for avoiding the trap

• Price the renewal, not the checkout page. Every comparison above comes from the same source: renewal price divided by nothing, first-year price ignored.
• Flat-pricing registrars win the long haul. Cloudflare and Dynadot currently renew .com at the registration price. If you plan to hold a domain for years, that beats any first-year discount.
• Treat cheap first years as marketing spend. A $1 .xyz or a $5 .info is a loss-leader. Check what it renews at — often $15–$30 — before you build anything on it.
• Re-check before renewing. Registrars move prices yearly. We track both first-year and renewal prices for every TLD we list in our domain price table.

Where to compare

Every registrar we track — Cloudflare, Namecheap, Dynadot, NameSilo, Porkbun, GoDaddy and IONOS — has first-year and renewal prices logged in our domains section, so you can price a domain over its whole life, not just its first year.