How much should a domain name cost?
About $10–$20 a year for a .com, and $5–$30 for most other extensions. If you're quoted more than $40 a year for a plain name, you're paying for something other than the name. The first-year price and the renewal price are usually different numbers — the renewal one is what you'll actually pay.
Domain pricing is deliberately confusing. The same name can be $1.99 today and $24.99 next year at the same company, and neither number is a lie.
Typical yearly prices
| Extension | Typical first year | Typical renewal |
|---|---|---|
| .com | $8–$12 | $12–$22 |
| .net | $10–$15 | $15–$25 |
| .org | $10–$15 | $15–$25 |
| .us | $5–$12 | $8–$20 |
| New extensions (.plumbing, .services, .studio) | $10–$40 | $25–$80 |
Prices move, so check the registrar's own renewal table. But the pattern holds: .com is the cheapest thing that people trust, and the flashy new extensions look cheap in year one and get expensive when they renew.
Why the price varies at all
Every registrar pays the same wholesale price to the registry that runs the extension — around $10 for a .com. The rest is markup, and registrars use domains as bait: sell the first year below cost, make it back at renewal, and hope you also buy hosting and email.
Some registrars are transparent. Cloudflare Registrar sells at wholesale with no discount and no markup, which means the first year and every year after are the same low number. Others run constant promotions. Neither model is dishonest, but only one of them is easy to predict.
What you should never pay for
- An SSL certificate. Free, everywhere, from Let's Encrypt. A registrar charging $50–$100 a year for one is selling you something you already have.
- A "premium" domain that isn't worth it. If the name you want is $800 because a speculator grabbed it in 2009, pick another name. Your customers will not care.
- Domain "protection" bundles. Auto-renew and a good password do the same job for nothing.
- A five-year prepay. It's not a scam, but it locks money into a name you may not want in two years. One year at a time, with auto-renew on, is fine.
What's worth paying a little extra for
- A registrar with a decent control panel. You'll log into it twice — once to point the domain at your site, maybe once to change an email setting. Bad panels waste an evening.
- Privacy protection, if it isn't included free. A few dollars a year to keep your home address out of a public database is reasonable, though most registrars redact it by default now.
The total, for a typical local business
One .com domain: about $15 a year. That's it. Hosting is a separate cost or free, and email is a separate cost or free.
So when someone quotes you "$299 for the year, and that includes your domain," you're paying roughly $285 for whatever else is in the box. Sometimes that's a fair price for a website. Just know which part is which.
Don't forget the renewal
The expensive mistake isn't overpaying by $5. It's forgetting to renew. A lapsed domain takes your website and your business email down at the same moment, and recovering it can cost $80–$200 in a redemption fee if you catch it late — or be impossible if someone else buys it.
Auto-renew on, card current, and check the account once a year. That's the whole maintenance schedule.
Next: what happens when a domain expires, or if you're still choosing, which extension to pick.