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Pricing

10 articles on pricing from the Dracon blog — data-anchored editorial on AI providers, games, music, and the tools we ship.

  1. Infrastructure The renewal trap, ranked: year-1 → year-2 jumps at 12 domain registrars The first year is marketing; the second year is the price. We ranked all 12 registrars in our captured catalog by their .com renewal jump, from IONOS's +1900% to Cloudflare's 0%.
  2. Infrastructure What the exchange rate does to your domain bill: EUR registrars in USD clothing A €10.07 renewal is not a $10.07 renewal. How ignoring the euro/dollar rate misranks European registrars by ~7%, and what fixed ranking looks like.
  3. Infrastructure The hidden ICANN fee: who includes the $0.18 and who tacks it on Every gTLD registration carries a mandatory $0.18/year ICANN fee. Whether it's already inside the listed price depends entirely on the registrar, and checkout is where you find out.
  4. Infrastructure Free first year = infinite markup: promo domains, dissected A $0 or $1 first year renders as a 0% 'renewal hike' on most comparison sites. The worst promos look like the best deals anywhere on the internet. Here is the math that fixes it.
  5. Infrastructure When $1.38 cheaper is worse: scoring features into price comparisons Two cloud storage plans, $1.38 apart on a $556 bill. Which wins? Our answer: price decides, near-ties badge. Why naive 'always cheapest' and old feature-band ranking lie in different ways.
  6. Infrastructure Vector DB free tiers, compared without the marketing gloss "Free forever" means 21 different things across the vector database market. Every free tier in our captured catalog (storage, vectors, queries, credits) on one honest table.
  7. Infrastructure Your first 10k emails: what transactional email really costs at launch Six vendors charge $0/month at launch volume, and the paid floor starts at $15. Every price below comes from our captured email-API catalog, run through the same compute engine our comparison tool uses.
  8. AI providers The cheapest way to run Claude right now: every route in our catalog, from $0 to $200 a month Seven providers we track serve Claude. Free lanes, pay-as-you-go, and subscriptions compared, with the catches and the cheapest route for light vs heavy use.
  9. Products What bring-your-own-key actually costs: the real math The honest math behind bring-your-own-key: real API token prices from our 45-provider catalog versus $20 AI subscriptions, and why Dracon Omni is $10.
  10. AI providers The AI price war went nuclear this week: DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.14/M tokens and GPT-5.6 Luna down 80%, in the same 24 hours OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna 80% on July 30; DeepSeek shipped V4 Flash to public beta July 31 from $0.14/M tokens. We track 45 AI providers. Here's what changed, with numbers.