What the exchange rate does to your domain bill: EUR registrars in USD clothing
Two of the twelve registrars in our domain comparison — Gandi and OVHcloud — price in euros, because they are European companies with European cost bases. Everyone else prices in dollars. That sounds like a trivial detail until you try to answer the question the whole tool exists for: which registrar is cheapest? The moment your ranking mixes currencies, it stops being a ranking and becomes a coincidence.
The bug we caught in our own rankings
When we added a "rank by ongoing $/yr" view to our tool, our first implementation compared renewal rates across registrars directly — €11.90 next to $10.47 as if the symbols were decoration. At the then-current 1.08 EUR/USD rate (the fixed conversion constant our compute engine publishes in `src/lib/fx.ts`), Gandi's €11.90 .com renewal is really about $12.85, and OVHcloud's €10.07 is about $10.88. Comparing the raw euro numbers against American dollar rates understated both by roughly 7% — enough to place OVHcloud second-cheapest on renewals when it actually belongs further down the board. We caught it in our own audit pass on 2026-08-22 and normalized every ranking key through the FX rate; the live tool now sorts on USD-normalized values while still displaying native currency.
What the corrected board looks like
| Registrar | Native renewal | USD equivalent | True rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | $9.15 | $9.15 | 1 |
| NameSilo | $10.47 | $10.47 | 2 |
| Dynadot | $10.67 | $10.67 | 3 |
| Porkbun | $10.68 | $10.68 | 4 |
| Spaceship | $10.75 | $10.75 | 5 |
| OVHcloud | €10.07 | ≈ $10.88 | 6 |
| Gandi | €11.90 | ≈ $12.85 | 7 |
| Namecheap | $13.55 | $13.55 | 8 |
Read that table twice, because the error direction is not intuitive. Naive symbol-blind sorting puts OVHcloud's €10.07 between Porkbun ($10.68) and Namecheap ($13.55) — second place. The honest conversion moves it below four dollar registrars. Seven cents of exchange rate did that; at other times in recent years the EUR/USD rate has been at or above 1.20, where the distortion would be 20% instead of 8%.
The part that isn't even about ranking
For anyone paid in dollars, a euro-denominated registrar is also a floating-rate subscription. Your OVHcloud renewal is €10.07 forever in euro terms, but its dollar cost drifts with the market — you are implicitly long EUR/USD every year you hold the domain. Some people actively want that hedge. Almost nobody chooses it consciously at checkout. A comparison site that hides the currency is choosing it for them.
- Always convert before comparing: the symbol is not decoration, and '€10' is not 'ten-ish dollars'.
- Beware fixed-rate marketing: some registrars bill in one currency and display another at their own conversion rate plus a spread.
- If you hold many domains for many years, currency drift can move your effective renewal more than most promo discounts save.
- Our tool ranks on FX-normalized totals (fixed 1.08 EUR/USD, published in code) and displays native prices side by side — checkable, not vibes.
The full ten-year picture — including where each registrar lands once everything is converted, fees handled honestly, and promos ignored — is the default view of the domain TCO tool.