The renewal trap, ranked: year-1 → year-2 jumps at 12 domain registrars
Domain pricing has two numbers and only one of them matters long-term. The first-year price is marketing — a loss leader designed to get your card on file. The renewal price is the one you will pay every year for as long as you hold the domain, which for a good domain means effectively forever. We captured every registrar price in our domain TCO tool — 12 registrars across 32 TLDs, each row dated with a capture timestamp — and computed the honest number the checkout page never shows you: the year-1 → year-2 jump on a .com.
The ranking (a .com, year 1 → year 2)
| Registrar | Year 1 | Renewal | Jump |
|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS | $1.00 | $20.00 | +1900% |
| GoDaddy | $11.99 | $23.19 | +93% |
| Namecheap | $9.19 | $13.55 | +47% |
| OVHcloud | €7.78 | €10.07 | +29% |
| Spaceship | $8.44 | $10.75 | +27% |
| Dynadot | $9.37 | $10.67 | +14% |
| Gandi | €10.52 | €11.90 | +13% |
| Hover | $14.81 | $15.77 | +6% |
| Porkbun | $10.11 | $10.68 | +6% |
| NameSilo | $10.18 | $10.47 | +3% |
| Cloudflare Registrar | $9.15 | $9.15 | 0% |
| Squarespace Domains | $20.00 | $20.00 | 0% |
The $1 domain is a $20 domain
IONOS's dollar-domain is the purest expression of the shape: $1 year one, $20 every year after — a 1,900% step-up that makes it the most expensive .com in our entire catalog from year two onward. Over the ten years most domains are actually held, that $1 headline becomes $181. Cloudflare's "boring" flat $9.15 becomes $91.50. The trap works because comparison shoppers sort by year one, and year one is precisely the number the trap is built on. The same pattern repeats on trendier TLDs: IONOS's captured .io jumps +241%, its .dev +147%, its .ai +118%.
What flat pricing looks like
Two registrars in the catalog charge exactly the same in year two as year one: Cloudflare (which sells at wholesale cost) and Squarespace (which starts expensive and stays there). Neither needs the promo trick because neither is buying market share with a loss leader. The near-flats are the quiet achievers: NameSilo at +3%, Porkbun and Hover at +6% — these are the renewals that look unexciting at checkout and look excellent five years later.
How to shop past the trap
- Sort by renewal, not entry — or better, by ten-year total cost, which is what our tool ranks by default.
- Distrust any first-year price below roughly half the going renewal rate; that gap is recovered somewhere, usually in year two.
- Check transfer-out rules before relying on the promo: the standard 60-day lock after registration means year one is yours whether you like the renewal or not.
- Remember ICANN's rule that transfers add a year to your registration — hopping registrars every promo cycle costs more effort than it saves at these prices.
Every figure above comes from prices we captured directly from registrar pricing pages (catalog verifiedAt 2026-08-20), not from affiliate feeds or marketing claims — and where a provider publishes no data, our catalog says so rather than guessing. The full picture, including multi-domain portfolios, transfer-in pricing, and ten-year trajectories, is interactive in the tool itself.