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Domainers up in arms as DomainTools pricing rockets

Kevin Murphy, April 27, 2016, 11:11:44 (UTC), Domain Services

Domain investors are loudly complaining about DomainTools’ plan to double its prices and slash query limits.
Some are even calling for a boycott.
Effective June 25, all the existing non-enterprise membership tiers are being folded into a new “Personal” account, which costs $99 a month or $995 a year, DomainTools said.
Previously, customers on a “Professional” account paid $49.95 a month. Some were paying as little as $12 under older, discontinued Gold, Silver and Bronze plans.
If the price hike weren’t significant enough, the company is also reducing the number of queries customers can make.
Whois History reports have been slashed from 100 domains to 25, for example, as have Hosting History reports. The Brand Monitor tool has been reduced from 10 monitored strings to 3.
DomainTools offers a broad range of services in its standard bundle, and the cuts are pretty much across the board.
DomainTools said in an email to bloggers this week that a 30% discount will be offered on the first payment under the new plan for existing customers, adding:

The Personal Membership package adds four products that have never been offered before to individual members. Bulk Parsed Whois and Reverse Whois Research Mode have previously only been available to Enterprise members. In addition, we are including our newest product, Reverse IP Whois, which works like our Reverse Whois for domain Whois, but across IP Whois records. And finally, Personal Membership also includes 5 Domain Reports per month.

The company says that it is focusing more now on its enterprise security customers, where one imagines margins are higher than its mass-market domainer-oriented services.
Domainers, as you might expect, are not happy. Message boards and domainer blogs are filled with negative commentary.
There are currently 50 comments slamming the move on DNW, many saying they will quit the service, and a call for a boycott on NamePros
Some are predicting customers will flock to rivals DomainIQ and Whoisology.
Disclosure: myself and several other domain industry bloggers are on complimentary plans and will not be affected by these changes. In some months, the new Personal plan would have been adequate for my needs; in others, not so much.

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