What a .me domain really costs over five years

What you get for the money

Five-year totals only tell you what you pay. What arrives for that price differs quite a bit, and two of the differences below cost nothing until the day they matter.

How this is calculated

What the five-year figure measures

It is the first-year registration price plus four renewals, which is what you actually pay to hold a domain for five years. A registrar's advertised price is the first year only, and for some registrars that is the cheapest year by a wide margin. Switch the control above to First year only and the ranking changes on plenty of extensions: that gap is the entire reason this page exists.

Where the numbers come from

Porkbun prices are read from our own live pricing as the page loads, the same figures you see on our pricing page, including the credit card fee we build into the displayed price. Competitor registration and renewal prices come from tldes.com, which tracks registrar pricing, and are refreshed daily.

Why some competitor prices here look higher than on their own site

ICANN charges every registrar a fee of 20 cents per year on each registration, renewal, and transfer of a generic extension such as .com or .xyz. Country-code extensions like .io and .co are not ICANN's to charge for, so the fee does not apply to them. Some registrars build the fee into the advertised price and some add it at checkout. GoDaddy and Namecheap quote without it; Porkbun and Cloudflare quote with it. Comparing those numbers as printed would make the first two look a dollar cheaper across five years than they actually are, so we add the fee to their generic-extension prices and leave their country-code prices alone. The result is what each registrar really takes over five years, which is the only comparison worth publishing.

What the first-year price already includes

It is whatever the registrar advertises today, and on most extensions that is already a discounted first year. Their advertised first year sits below their own renewal rate: GoDaddy on 371 of the 490 extensions they sell, and Namecheap on 528 of the 531 extensions they sell. That gap is the whole reason this page exists, and it is in the default view without touching a single control.

Why promo codes are off by default

Separately from the advertised price, registrars run coupon offers that sit below it, and those usually carry a condition: a code to enter, or being a new customer. They are off by default because a price you can only get by hunting for a code, once, is not what the domain costs to own. Switch them on and the lowest one we can see is applied, with the condition printed beside it. They are also much rarer than advertised first-year discounts, so on most extensions the control has nothing to apply and says so.

Renewal coupon offers are excluded. They are not dependable years into the future, and they are rare in the first place, because renewals are where the registries selling us the extensions make their money. A registry cutting its renewal price is a different thing: where a registrar has passed that into its advertised renewal rate, the rate is used as it stands, for us and for them. It does mean a five-year total assumes today's renewal rate holds for four more renewals, which is the same assumption applied to every registrar here.

What is left out

Premium and aftermarket domains, which are priced per name rather than per extension. Taxes, which depend on where you live. Transfer prices. Negotiated or reseller rates. Anything that needs a phone call to obtain.

Reading this with a script or an assistant?

The same comparison is served as plain Markdown at /about/domain-cost-calculator/me.md, with the figures, the conditions attached to any promotional price, and the date they were checked. Quote that rather than scraping the table.

Found a number that looks wrong?

Tell us and we will check it: support@porkbun.com. We would rather fix a figure than be quoted on a stale one.

Across every extension we sell

We carry 636 extensions. There are 564 that at least one of these three also sells, and we are the cheapest or tied over five years on 433 of them. Someone else is genuinely cheaper on 131, and there are 69 extensions that only we offer.

• Cloudflare carries 412 of ours, and beats us over five years on 128.
• GoDaddy carries 490 of ours and never beats us over five years on any of them.
• Namecheap carries 531 of ours, and beats us over five years on 3.

FAQs on domain name costs

Is Porkbun cheaper than GoDaddy?

Yes, Porkbun is cheaper than GoDaddy on .me by $47.60 over five years: $86.35 against $133.95. The difference is mostly the renewal rate rather than the first year, which is the part an advertised price does not show you.

Why is Cloudflare sometimes cheaper than Porkbun?

Cloudflare is not cheaper than Porkbun because they sell domains at cost. So do we, on plenty of extensions. The difference is which costs each of us has to count. Card processing fees are a real line item on every domain we sell, and our price has to carry them. At Cloudflare's size, with an enterprise customer base behind it, that cost effectively disappears into the rest of the business. We are not so patrician, and have to care about more plebeian things like what the card networks charge us. Paying with ACH takes most of that out of our price and closes much of the gap.

There are two other limitations to using Cloudflare vs Porkbun. You have to use their nameservers, so you may have difficulty pointing to some web hosts. And they do not offer any customer support on the free plan, only community based forums and guides. If neither matters to you, their price is genuinely good, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Why is the renewal price higher than the first year?

The domain renewal price is higher than the first year often because the registry itself discounts the first year. Registries run promotions on new extensions to get them established, and a registrar passes that through: the low first year is genuinely what it cost, and the renewal is the real price. That is what is happening whenever you see us do it.

On a legacy extension like .com there is no such registry promotion to pass on, so a first year well under the going rate is a loss leader, sold below the ongoing rate on the reasonable assumption that moving a domain later is a hassle. The five-year view above is the way to tell the two apart: look at the renewal, not the first year.

Separately, renewal prices at every registrar move when a registry raises its wholesale price. That gets passed to everyone, us included.

Can I move a domain to Porkbun to get the cheaper renewal?

Yes, you can transfer a domain to Porkbun and get a cheaper renewal, and you do not lose the time you have already paid for. A transfer adds a year on top of whatever is left on the domain, and it is priced like a renewal. So if your domain is coming up for renewal somewhere more expensive, transferring it here instead of renewing there gets you the same extra year at our price.¹

Does WHOIS privacy cost extra?

No, WHOIS privacy does not cost extra at Porkbun or any of the three registrars compared here for basic privacy. It is priced into this calculator anyway, so the day one of them starts charging, the totals here will say so.

Cloudflare is the odd one out on what you get for it. They redact rather than use a privacy service, so their WHOIS still shows your state and country.

1. Not every extension works this way. On .de and .nl a transfer adds no year and does not carry across the registration you have already paid for, so moving one early loses whatever time was left on it. On .au, .co.uk, .com.au, .id.au, .me.uk, .net.au, .org.au, .org.uk, .si, .uk the move is free and adds no year, and the expiry date comes across as it stands.

Other extensions

.com cost over 5 years .net cost over 5 years .org cost over 5 years .io cost over 5 years .co cost over 5 years .dev cost over 5 years .ai cost over 5 years .app cost over 5 years .xyz cost over 5 years .shop cost over 5 years .site cost over 5 years

Or pick any of the 637 extensions we sell from the menu at the top of this page.