Domains

How prices are set

Every retail price on this site is derived from wholesale cost, never typed by hand. Each TLD sits in a category — essentials, popular, developer, business, creative — and each category carries its own markup rate. A single rate over costs that range from $2.60 to $45 would overprice the names people actually compare and underprice the cheap promotional ones. A hard floor of $2.50 per year above cost applies on top, and everything rounds up to the next .99. If a registry raises its renewal rate, our price moves with it — there is no code path where a promotion can push a TLD below break-even.

We also refuse to discount the first year and recover it at renewal. The same markup applies to both, and a build-time check fails if that ever stops being true.

Where our prices sit

We are not the cheapest, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Two registrars sell a .com at cost with no markup — Cloudflare at $10.44 and Porkbun at $11.08 — and both hold it flat, exactly as we do. Ours is $14.99, flat in both years.

The lowest price our own margin policy permits is $13.99 (cost + $2.50), which is $3.55 above an at-cost seller's price. No discount available inside our rules reaches them, and matching them would mean selling at a loss. Against a dated snapshot of twelve registrars we rank 11th of 13 on first-year price and 9th of 13 over five years. We do not compete on the domain itself — the reason to register here is the bundle.

Flat renewals are worth stating plainly too: they are not unique to us. Seven of the twelve registrars surveyed already hold year two at year one. The promotional-then-hike pattern belongs to hosts that bundle a domain as a loss leader, not to registrars.

When a domain is free

A domain is free for year one when it rides along with a qualifying annual hosting plan — Launch and above on App Hosting, Pro on Static. It is one domain per account.

A domain is not free on the free tiers. Those tiers cost us the full wholesale registration fee and earn nothing, so bundling a domain would mean paying for the privilege of acquiring you. The domain is still available at list price.

Renewals

Domains renew annually and auto-renew is on by default. The renewal price is printed next to the first-year price on every TLD, before you pay — for .com that is $14.99 today and $14.99 at renewal.

The same markup applies to registration and renewal. We do not discount the first year and recover it later. Where a renewal does cost more, it is because the registry raised our cost: .store and .shop renew far above their first-year price because their registries charge a step-up in year two, and the difference tracks that cost. Registry pricing is not ours to set; passing it on visibly rather than hiding it is.

You will be reminded before the renewal date, and the domain stays yours even if you cancel hosting.

Transfers

A domain registered elsewhere can be moved to Zeso once you have its authorization code. Transfers take about five days, and the domain keeps serving your site throughout.