At-Cost domain registrars?

Kirsten

Are there any At-Cost (no markup, as in domains cost ICANN fee + registry fee) domain registrars apart from Freenom, that doesn't charge a membership fee/subscription plan for the service?

RadWebHosting

Honestly, I don't understand the business model of Freenom, but I will not argue!

HackedServer

Porkbun I believe does at cost for .net, .com, .org. Free whois.

kcrooke said: A couple people have commented on our pricing – we just charge a $1 markup on most non-premium domains (after CC and ICANN fees). The exceptions being .com/.net/.org – we're not marking those up.

Rayhan

NameBright doing this.

Dylan

HackedServer said: Porkbun I believe does at cost for .net, .com, .org. Free whois.

kcrooke said: A couple people have commented on our pricing – we just charge a $1 markup on most non-premium domains (after CC and ICANN fees). The exceptions being .com/.net/.org – we're not marking those up.

They must have changed policies since they posted that because there is a markup now: Porkbun charges $8.84 for a .com while the wholesale price is $8.03 ($7.85 to Verisign + $0.18 to ICANN).

I'm personally more than fine paying a measly 10% markup because the company won't be around long if they can't pay overhead too, but it is a markup.

William

Kirsten said: Are there any At-Cost (no markup, as in domains cost ICANN fee + registry fee) domain registrars apart from Freenom, that doesn't charge a membership fee/subscription plan for the service?

What incentive would anyone have to do this? You basically want something that generates zero profit, if not costs after payment gateway fees, and then are likely surprised when they go bankrupt...

Ole_Juul

William said: What incentive would anyone have to do this?

With Freenom, they hope you'll get a free domain, and as it becomes valuable to you will want to secure it by paying. They're a bit sleazy though. I expect others would do it as a loss leader, but don't know that for a fact.

William

Freenom has some other financing also, yea, so bit of an outlier - a general registrar doing loss like that sounds pretty bad though...

2gouzi

Freenom's ID Shield is always free?

ricardo

Namebright. Their support isn't great but they've traditionally been used for domain parking from what I understand. Every time I've contacted support, about a half dozen times, the same person replies. Their API is also a little unfinished but otherwise they do their job as a registrar.

2gouzi

@ricardo said:
Namebright. Their support isn't great but they've traditionally been used for domain parking from what I understand. Every time I've contacted support, about a half dozen times, the same person replies. Their API is also a little unfinished but otherwise they do their job as a registrar.

I can only pay using paypal. Is it ok if I use paypal?

ricardo

2gouzi said: paypal

They accept Paypal to fund the account.

Setsura

@William said:
Freenom has some other financing also, yea, so bit of an outlier - a general registrar doing loss like that sounds pretty bad though...

Is there some catch to Freenom? Their .net price at 6.71 seems too low to be real.

William

Setsura said: Is there some catch to Freenom?

They seem to make most of their money otherwise, so i don't think so - but risk wise this would be far too high for my liking still.

dragon2611

The only way this would make sense financially for them is if they are then selling you some other service that's profitable.