In terms of overall domain portfolio, a few dollars saved on a domain name may not make much difference. But if there are ways to stretch your money, why not consider them?
Of course the most significant savings are:
Find Best Rates
There are a number of sites to help you find the best rates for domain registration, transfer and renewal:
These are all free to use, and I presume are funded through affiliate links and/or advertising.
I covered TLD-list in an earlier NamePros article, Get More from TLD-List, so let’s look at the others.
I’ve only started to use DomNest recently. It has a visually pleasing display, and covers not just TLD pricing, but also hosting services. One thing I like is there is a single page with current best pricing at many of the most popular extensions. You just click on the button to go to the detailed listing for that TLD.
DomNest also has a section for free domain offers. All of the sites offer details on active discount coupons – see the next section.
Be sure to research a registrar that you are considering using for the first time, looking at features they offer, and reputation, as well as participation in the registrar networks. The annual Best Registrar Poll at NamePros provides an indication of registrars popular among investors. Also browse discussions such as this one on Favourite Registrars.
One nice feature of TLDES is that if you press the + sign it will give you information on the registrar.
Watch for Coupons and Offers
There is a section of NamePros called Coupons and Offers. You will see most of the promotions listed there, but it is also a good idea to follow the registrars of most interest to you.
As was mentioned in the 2019 article Saving Money on Domain Names:
Spaceship has a ton of coupons, but most are single use. You can use the pricing aggregators to help find coupons. If you use TLDES, hover over the i to see the coupon options.
There is a similar functionality at DomComp and DomNest (see below), while TLD-List shows the coupon details right in the block with the registrar pricing. Note that the coupons are not identical across the aggregators, so worth your while to use more than one.
Here at NamePros, @aelko is associated with TLDES, and if you follow him he often posts about registrar promotions and coupons.
Wait For Deals
One way to save money is to wait for deals. There are usually great deals around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Various registrars offer monthly deals. Because most are already offering .com domains at about their cost from Verisign, there are usually not great deals on .com renewals, however.
Registering for Multiple Years
While these are not normally offered in legacy extensions, in some extensions you can sometimes get a much better deal if you register for multiple years up front. Both Namecheap and Dynadot regularly offer multi-year deals, and you will occasionally find them at other registrars. With the sell-through rate on most domain names only about 1%, or even less, it makes sense to register quality names for multiple years if there is a substantial saving.
Here are a few examples:
The best known discount program is GoDaddy Domain Discount Club. Currently the Premium Membership costs $239.88 USD per year, but it means that .com names are $10.25 per year, rather than $21.99, .net will be $12.99 instead of $24.99 with no membership. It is true that you can get these rates, or better, without a membership at some other registrars. However, if you prefer to consolidate domain names at the largest registrar, or because you do a lot of expiring auction and closeout purchases you need to pay GoDaddy renewal/transfer fees, the membership may make sense..
Let’s look only at .com. With the membership you save $11.74 per domain name, so just 21 domains per year at GoDaddy justify the membership cost. Discount Club membership also comes with a GoDaddy Auction membership, better terms on Cash Parking, and access to the course materials and tools of the Domain Academy. I reviewed the Domain Academy recently in the NamePros Blog: Everything You Wanted to Know About Domain Academy..
Dynadot has Bulk and Super Bulk pricing. While Dynadot has been offering everyone Super Bulk pricing for some months, I think that will not always be the case. You can read about Dynadot Bulk and Super Bulk here. You need to spend $500 per year to qualify for Bulk, and $5000 for Super Bulk, but as long as you have prepaid your account with that amount then you are eligible for one year of pricing – you don’t need to immediately spend it all. Dynadot indicates in your account current status for maintaining Bulk or Super Bulk.
NameSilo has a Discount program too. You just need to opt in and fund your account each time with a minimum of $50 prepaid. While on most extensions you just save $0.10 or so on renewal and registration, at the current time .com registration is $11.95 instead of $13.95 (assuming one or a few registrations). There are further discounts if you are registering in bulk.
Domain Cost Club offers domains, both registrations and renewals, at wholesale cost, although with most payment forms a processing fee is added. There are plans from about $10 to $100 per year, depending on how many domains.
Avoid Costly Mistakes
In an earlier NamePros article Avoiding Costly Mistakes as a Domain Investor I covered such topics as unintended renewals, auction purchases with expensive renewals, falling into redemption charges, misspelled names, proxy bid errors, and more.
Renew in Advance of Price Increases
Monitor upcoming price changes using TLDPriceChanges.com, and renew in advance names that you intent to keep long term.
Note that the price on .app and .dev are scheduled to increase on Aug. 1, 2024, while .com goes up again on Sept 1, 2024. The .xyz suite of extensions increase on Sept. 2, 2024.
With typical sell-through rates, it makes economic sense to renew quality names in advance. I outline the probability of the situation in Applied Probability for Domain Investing.
Save With Funding Options
Several registrars provide incentives based on how you fund your account. For example, if you add to your balance at Dynadot from an applicable checking account there are extra savings. Also, if you sell domain names through their marketplace, there is an incentive to use the funds for future services, rather than withdraw the funds.
Domain Cost Club normally adds a processing fee when using credit cards to PayPal, but if you fund your account via prepaid deposit these are avoided.
Save on Premium Renewals
In most cases, I think it is hard to make registry premium names worthwhile as investments. However, if you do invest in registry premium names, be sure to shop around for the best rate. Some registrars apply significant markups to premium names. Domain Cost Club offers premiums at registry wholesale. You can check pricing there to see if your registrar is offering a good rate.
Use Rewards Programs
A few of the registrars are members of reward programs. For example, GoDaddy is part of Rakuten, and you can get 2.5% back on many purchases.
Please add in the comment section additional ways to save money.
Of course the most significant savings are:
- Don’t spend money on domain names of low quality that will probably never sell.
- Only renew domain names when the probability of selling justifies it.
- Don’t overpay in auctions. Walk away if the price is more than the wholesale worth of the name
Find Best Rates
There are a number of sites to help you find the best rates for domain registration, transfer and renewal:
These are all free to use, and I presume are funded through affiliate links and/or advertising.
I covered TLD-list in an earlier NamePros article, Get More from TLD-List, so let’s look at the others.
I’ve only started to use DomNest recently. It has a visually pleasing display, and covers not just TLD pricing, but also hosting services. One thing I like is there is a single page with current best pricing at many of the most popular extensions. You just click on the button to go to the detailed listing for that TLD.
Screen capture of section of the main TLD pricing screen, courtesy of Domnest. When you click on a button it takes you to detailed information for that TLD. Note that in many cases prices are based on a coupon for a single registration.
DomNest also has a section for free domain offers. All of the sites offer details on active discount coupons – see the next section.
Be sure to research a registrar that you are considering using for the first time, looking at features they offer, and reputation, as well as participation in the registrar networks. The annual Best Registrar Poll at NamePros provides an indication of registrars popular among investors. Also browse discussions such as this one on Favourite Registrars.
One nice feature of TLDES is that if you press the + sign it will give you information on the registrar.
Screen capture from TLDES. When you click the + button it will display information on the registrar including TrustPilot reviews. Data shown here for GoDaddy.
Watch for Coupons and Offers
There is a section of NamePros called Coupons and Offers. You will see most of the promotions listed there, but it is also a good idea to follow the registrars of most interest to you.
As was mentioned in the 2019 article Saving Money on Domain Names:
Tip: Use the Watch Forum feature at the top of any NamePros section, such as Domain Offers, to receive notifications of new threads, to be alerted of new offers as soon as they become available.
Spaceship has a ton of coupons, but most are single use. You can use the pricing aggregators to help find coupons. If you use TLDES, hover over the i to see the coupon options.
Screen capture of section of the screen for .com prices at TLDES. Hover over the small
i to show coupons active for the extension at that registrar, in the case shown .com at Spaceship.There is a similar functionality at DomComp and DomNest (see below), while TLD-List shows the coupon details right in the block with the registrar pricing. Note that the coupons are not identical across the aggregators, so worth your while to use more than one.
Screen capture of section of the screen for .com prices, at time of writing, courtesy of Domnest. Hover over the small
i and coupons active for that extension, .com in this case, at that registrar, Namecheap shown, will pop up. Note that the display also indicates payment options at that registrar, for example if they accept Bitcoin or PayPal as well as credit cards.Here at NamePros, @aelko is associated with TLDES, and if you follow him he often posts about registrar promotions and coupons.
Wait For Deals
One way to save money is to wait for deals. There are usually great deals around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Various registrars offer monthly deals. Because most are already offering .com domains at about their cost from Verisign, there are usually not great deals on .com renewals, however.
Registering for Multiple Years
While these are not normally offered in legacy extensions, in some extensions you can sometimes get a much better deal if you register for multiple years up front. Both Namecheap and Dynadot regularly offer multi-year deals, and you will occasionally find them at other registrars. With the sell-through rate on most domain names only about 1%, or even less, it makes sense to register quality names for multiple years if there is a substantial saving.
Here are a few examples:
- At Dynadot one year of .xyz is currently $1.99. The renewal cost is $10.99, for a two year total of $12.98. But if you register for two years at the outset it is $8.99.
- Renewal for the .space extension is normally more than $21 per year, but if you register for two years at Namecheap it is $9.34 for the two years combined.
- The .tech extension is deeply discounted in year one, but will set you back at least $40 per year to renew. At Namecheap you can register two years for $9.34, but if you go outside the domain community to sites like StackSocial you can at time of writing get 5 years for $29.99 or 10 years for $54.99.
- Dynadot has for a long time had a great multiyear deal on .cc, just $3.99 per year for up to 10 years.
- NameSilo allows you to register, transfer or renew .link domains at just $3.99 per year for as many years as you want.
The best known discount program is GoDaddy Domain Discount Club. Currently the Premium Membership costs $239.88 USD per year, but it means that .com names are $10.25 per year, rather than $21.99, .net will be $12.99 instead of $24.99 with no membership. It is true that you can get these rates, or better, without a membership at some other registrars. However, if you prefer to consolidate domain names at the largest registrar, or because you do a lot of expiring auction and closeout purchases you need to pay GoDaddy renewal/transfer fees, the membership may make sense..
Let’s look only at .com. With the membership you save $11.74 per domain name, so just 21 domains per year at GoDaddy justify the membership cost. Discount Club membership also comes with a GoDaddy Auction membership, better terms on Cash Parking, and access to the course materials and tools of the Domain Academy. I reviewed the Domain Academy recently in the NamePros Blog: Everything You Wanted to Know About Domain Academy..
Dynadot has Bulk and Super Bulk pricing. While Dynadot has been offering everyone Super Bulk pricing for some months, I think that will not always be the case. You can read about Dynadot Bulk and Super Bulk here. You need to spend $500 per year to qualify for Bulk, and $5000 for Super Bulk, but as long as you have prepaid your account with that amount then you are eligible for one year of pricing – you don’t need to immediately spend it all. Dynadot indicates in your account current status for maintaining Bulk or Super Bulk.
NameSilo has a Discount program too. You just need to opt in and fund your account each time with a minimum of $50 prepaid. While on most extensions you just save $0.10 or so on renewal and registration, at the current time .com registration is $11.95 instead of $13.95 (assuming one or a few registrations). There are further discounts if you are registering in bulk.
Domain Cost Club offers domains, both registrations and renewals, at wholesale cost, although with most payment forms a processing fee is added. There are plans from about $10 to $100 per year, depending on how many domains.
Avoid Costly Mistakes
In an earlier NamePros article Avoiding Costly Mistakes as a Domain Investor I covered such topics as unintended renewals, auction purchases with expensive renewals, falling into redemption charges, misspelled names, proxy bid errors, and more.
Renew in Advance of Price Increases
Monitor upcoming price changes using TLDPriceChanges.com, and renew in advance names that you intent to keep long term.
Note that the price on .app and .dev are scheduled to increase on Aug. 1, 2024, while .com goes up again on Sept 1, 2024. The .xyz suite of extensions increase on Sept. 2, 2024.
With typical sell-through rates, it makes economic sense to renew quality names in advance. I outline the probability of the situation in Applied Probability for Domain Investing.
Save With Funding Options
Several registrars provide incentives based on how you fund your account. For example, if you add to your balance at Dynadot from an applicable checking account there are extra savings. Also, if you sell domain names through their marketplace, there is an incentive to use the funds for future services, rather than withdraw the funds.
Domain Cost Club normally adds a processing fee when using credit cards to PayPal, but if you fund your account via prepaid deposit these are avoided.
Save on Premium Renewals
In most cases, I think it is hard to make registry premium names worthwhile as investments. However, if you do invest in registry premium names, be sure to shop around for the best rate. Some registrars apply significant markups to premium names. Domain Cost Club offers premiums at registry wholesale. You can check pricing there to see if your registrar is offering a good rate.
Use Rewards Programs
A few of the registrars are members of reward programs. For example, GoDaddy is part of Rakuten, and you can get 2.5% back on many purchases.
Please add in the comment section additional ways to save money.
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