Domain registrars, ranked by what it costs to leave

Domain retail is a subscription business disguised as a purchase. The first year is the customer-acquisition budget; every year after that is the margin. That is why a .com can be advertised at A$4.95 and renew at A$39.95, and why the only price on this page that matters is the renewal column. If you register a domain you intend to keep, the first-year price is noise.

Three registrars are worth defaulting to. Cloudflare Registrar charges the registry fee plus the ICANN transaction fee and nothing else — there is no markup and there never has been, because domains exist to pull you onto Cloudflare's DNS. The catch is that it only registers domains you already have on a Cloudflare zone, it sells a narrow TLD list, no .au, and support is a ticket queue. Porkbun is the better general-purpose choice: near-cost pricing, free WHOIS privacy, free email forwarding, free SSL, one-click DNSSEC, and an auth code sitting in the dashboard the moment you unlock. NameSilo is the one to use when you hold hundreds of domains and care more about bulk tooling and flat renewals than about the interface.

The expensive end is expensive for a reason. GoDaddy and Crazy Domains run the same playbook — loss-leader first year, aggressive checkout upsells, paid add-ons for things competitors give away (DNSSEC behind Premium DNS at GoDaddy, free email forwarding withdrawn in 2022), and an exit path that routes through retention offers. Squarespace Domains inherited the Google Domains book at a flat twenty dollars and has been quietly the least annoying of the expensive registrars, but you are paying roughly double Cloudflare for a nicer control panel. Gandi used to be the principled European choice and repriced itself out of that role in 2023; it is now a specialist pick for TLD breadth and registry lock, not a value one.

For .au the calculus is different and mostly not about price. auDA-accredited registrars — VentraIP, Synergy Wholesale, Crazy Domains, GoDaddy — differ by an amount of money that will not change your life, and differ enormously in whether a human answers when a .com.au transfer stalls. VentraIP and Synergy Wholesale both run Australian support desks that understand the auDA transfer rules; the international registrars that resell .au generally do not. WHOIS privacy is irrelevant here: auDA already redacts registrant contact data, so a registrar charging you for .au privacy is charging you for nothing.

The direction of travel is consolidation. Verisign takes its permitted .com increase in most years and every registrar passes it through, which slowly compresses the gap between the cheap and expensive tiers in percentage terms while widening it in dollars. Meanwhile the interesting registrars are becoming front ends for something else — Cloudflare wants your DNS, Squarespace wants your site, Spaceship wants Namecheap's next decade of customers. Pick the one whose real business you are happy to be adjacent to.

Every registrar in this table knows the same thing: domain churn is low. Once a domain is attached to a live site, an MX record and a dozen DNS entries nobody remembers creating, the annual renewal invoice gets approved without being read. That is the asset being bought when a registrar sells you a .com for the price of a coffee.

The delta column makes the strategy visible. Cloudflare, Porkbun, NameSilo, Squarespace and Gandi charge roughly the same in year one as in year five — different amounts, but flat. Namecheap, Spaceship, GoDaddy, Sav and Crazy Domains do not, and the gap runs from a few dollars to more than twenty. Crazy Domains is the extreme case: a first year priced to win a comparison-shopping click, and a renewal priced for someone who has stopped comparison shopping.

There are two defences. The first is to prepay — nearly every registrar will sell up to ten years of a .com up front at the current renewal rate, which locks out both the registrar's margin creep and Verisign's annual increase. The second is to treat the renewal price as the only price, sort this table by it, and accept paying five dollars more in year one for the privilege of never thinking about it again.

Transfers are governed by ICANN's transfer policy, so the mechanics are identical everywhere: unlock, get the authorisation code, initiate at the gaining registrar, approve. What differs is how many steps a registrar inserts between you and that code, and none of those steps are in the transfer policy. The friction score on this page is that count.

At the good end — Cloudflare, Porkbun, Synergy Wholesale — the code is a field in the dashboard next to the lock toggle, and the whole thing takes ninety seconds plus the five-day registry wait. In the middle sit registrars that email the code after a delay, ask you to re-verify the account, or put a retention offer in front of the button. At the bad end you are on the phone, uploading identity documents, or discovering that a domain-protection product you were upsold in 2023 must be cancelled before the domain will unlock at all.

Two rules apply regardless of registrar. You cannot transfer a domain within 60 days of registering it or of a previous transfer, and changing the registrant contact can restart that clock — so do the transfer first and tidy the contacts afterwards. And your unused time comes with you: a transfer adds a year to the existing expiry rather than resetting it, so leaving mid-term costs you nothing beyond the year you buy on the way in. .au transfers work differently again — a registrar-issued auth code, no ICANN five-day window, and an accredited Australian registrar will unstick a stalled one far faster than an offshore reseller.

.au has rules the gTLDs do not. You need an Australian presence — an ABN, ACN, registered trademark or equivalent — and for .com.au that presence must be a commercial entity. The registrar checks it, and a mismatch can cost you the name later. Since direct .au registration opened, most businesses hold both the .com.au and the matching .au, which doubles the renewal line and is worth budgeting for.

Price differences between accredited Australian registrars are small and rarely the deciding factor. Support is. When a .com.au is stuck mid-transfer or an eligibility check fails, you want a registrar that can speak to the registry on your behalf during Australian business hours, which is what VentraIP and Synergy Wholesale actually sell. Crazy Domains is accredited and cheap in year one, and behaves like the international discount registrars in every other respect.

One thing not to pay for: .au WHOIS privacy. auDA already withholds registrant contact details from public WHOIS, so a privacy add-on on an Australian domain is a line item with no product behind it.

This page is about buying, renewing, transferring and holding domains through a dashboard, as a person. If you are automating registration — provisioning a domain per customer, sweeping availability, wiring DNS records from a deploy script — the constraints are completely different: reseller agreements, prepaid balances, OTE sandboxes, and whether renewal pricing is even exposed on the wire.

Looking to register domains from code? → /compare/domain-api-providers

The overlap in vendor names is real but the decision is not the same one. Several registrars that are excellent to hold domains with have no public API at all, and several with first-class APIs will not take your money until you sign a reseller contract and fund a four-figure float.

Prices are the advertised retail price for a one-year .com registration and a one-year .com renewal, in US dollars, excluding sales tax and GST, taken from public pricing pages rather than logged-in carts. The delta column is renewal minus first year — the number the marketing is designed to stop you computing. Australian figures are .com.au retail renewal in AUD excluding GST. Where a registrar quotes in another currency the figure has been converted at an approximate mid-market rate and flagged as inferred. Treat every price cell here as accurate to the dollar, not the cent, and re-check before buying in bulk.

Transfer-out friction is a 1–5 ladder scored from the documented process plus consistent user reports, not from vendor claims. Level 1 means the domain unlocks with one toggle and the auth code is on screen immediately. Level 5 means a phone call, an identity document, a paid add-on that must be cancelled first, or a hold beyond the ICANN 60-day rule. The scores at levels 4 and 5 are the ones we most want to replace with measured runs: the plan is to attempt a real transfer out of each registrar on the 30-day verification cycle and re-label the result as measured. Until then these cells are marked community or inferred, and you should read them as "how much of your afternoon this will cost", not as a stopwatch reading.