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Honestly, I don't understand the business model of Freenom, but I will not argue!
Porkbun I believe does at cost for .net, .com, .org. Free whois.
NameBright doing this.
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.
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...
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.
Freenom has some other financing also, yea, so bit of an outlier - a general registrar doing loss like that sounds pretty bad though...
Freenom's ID Shield is always free?
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?
They accept Paypal to fund the account.
Is there some catch to Freenom? Their .net price at 6.71 seems too low to be real.
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.
The only way this would make sense financially for them is if they are then selling you some other service that's profitable.