Recent Posts
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Cloudflare goes all-in with at-cost domains
Kevin Murphy,
September 28, 2021, 14:20:34 (UTC),
Domain Registrars
Content delivery specialist Cloudflare has come out as a fully-fledged domain name registrar, promising to sell names in hundreds of TLDs with no markup on the registry wholesale price.
Since the company launched Cloudflare Registrar three years ago, it’s only been possible for customers to transfer in their domains from other registrars; no new regs were possible.
That’s now changed, with the company today announcing customers can buy their domains direct without having to faff about with transfers.
“It’s important to note that our registrar pricing is ‘at-cost.’ That means we charge our customers exactly what we pay the registry, plus any applicable ICANN transaction fees,” the company blogged.
A new .com costs $8.57, for example.
It appears that you need to be a Cloudflare CDN customer to use the registrar service, but it offers a free plan among its suite of offerings.
It’s not the only registrar to offer names at cost, but it’s certainly the one with the best brand recognition.
Cloudflare currently offers over 250 TLDs, and plans to launch 40 more next month. It just added .uk, and plans to add more ccTLDs, as well as premium-priced domains, in future.
The company had about 325,000 domains under management at the last count in May, having transferred a net of 118,000 names during the previous 12 months.
Make no mistake, Cloudflare will be losing money on this venture, despite what it said in September 2018, when it made out running a registrar was cost-free.
Seems like registration isn’t their goal, conversion to other products or user data is. Only time will tell what happens and as a publicly traded company, we all get to see how it unfolds.
They were good in the first year but then they decided to start charging VAT, so for anyone from a VAT jurisdiction their domains pricing is far from being “at-cost”, unfortunately.