Yahoo! does the same thing.
Even if you transfer your name out, you still have to cancel the name in your panel; otherwise, Yahoo! will continue to charge your card.
Well, if the deal is you get extreme cheapo price for 1.99, in exchange that you
remember to "cancel" your plan on your panel, that's easy. I can live with that. So the "
cancel your plan" part, is not an issue.
I think many people, forget to cancel their plan, and Yahoo earns money from this "forgetfulness". It's probably a sustainable business model that allows them to keep offering 1.99 domains. Too many forgetful people to allow for a profitable market, i suppose.
it nearly happened to me with a domain that refused to be canceled, no matter what I did (I had to call customer (no) service, a story in itself).
So, alien51, you should check your cc statements.
I'm not defending Yahoo, but perhaps your experience could have been a glitch, or maybe it happened a long time ago and now they have made it much easier to cancel.
Because i have had over 2 dozen domains with Yahoo, and they transferred out fine. In fact, i just transferred out a domain just recently with no hitch. And the "plan" was cancelled in just 5 steps that you click. I've been doing this for 2 years now, since Yahoo's 1.99 promo seem to be an all-year-round promo.
My cc has never been charged $34.95 full price.
I suggest though, that you use Paypal, because Yahoo seems to be very strict with non-matching Name and Billing Address. With Namecheap, evenif i put a vague billing address (say, just the street with no house number), my credit card transaction works fine. But not with Yahoo. They seem to use some kind of text-string matching algo to see if the billing address is the same. If you make a typo, then you get screwed and your transaction won't push through. So to get around this issue, you can pay using Paypal and you don't need to type your billing address anymore.
Again, Yahoo! is not domainer friendly.
This, i may have to agree.
I don't think Yahoo even has that "Push" feature to transfer a domain to someone else, if you are a Domainer.
But since i'm about 80% end-user, and 20% Domainer, i just leave my "domains-in-the-freezer" stuff here to get that 1.99 (1-year domain life). Imagine if i renew that same domain at Godaddy for $8 bucks just sitting there doing nothing. I saved $7.