Donuts - Fair price for .network domain?

[luckman212]

I registered a domain (reliable.network) a few of years ago with GoDaddy for $500. I thought the price was very high but I hoped it was just an up-front price and that the yearly renewals would be less. It's been 3 years now and the price hasn't budged. I've since changed registrars to Google Domains which is $60 less but still $440/yr.

The .network gTLD is owned by Donuts,Inc, and they have been a brick wall - I've tried reaching out to a few contacts that I found on their site, but none of them responded.

I don't want to return this domain, but I'm just using it for my one-man-show consulting side business which isn't making any money yet.

Does anyone know anybody at Donuts, or anything I can do in this case? Other .network domains are $4-$10 year so this feels very unfair to me. I'd be ok with paying something like $50-75/year but 500 is just not sustainable.

 

[ecalc]

I can offer no help in cutting your renewal fee other than to say if it was me I'd set auto renew off and go hand reg reliable-network dot com for $10 in a heartbeat and I don't like hyphens, good luck!

edit - regarding fairness, I'd say yes $500 is fair if it complies with the terms and conditions in place when you registered the name.

 

[griff]

It's a registry premium so it's unlikely they'll budge much; names like best.network are are all $800+ renewal fees too. Best bet is to drop it and stop allowing these people to mug you off.

P.S I can see the .com is listed at $6k BIN - you'd be better off trying to haggle the price on that and pay $10 a year instead of ~$500 each year on this, it can really add up

(and as an additional bonus, this name in .com is quite nice so you'd probably be able to resell it and recoup a bit of the initial investment if one day you didn't need it anymore, unlike the .network which has no resale value especially at that renewal)