AI Tools
The GoDaddy Tax: What Your Domain Actually Costs (and Where to Move It)
GoDaddy renews a .com at about $21.99 and a .ai at $159.99 — roughly double the at-cost price charged by Vercel, Cloudflare, and Porkbun, which sell domains at registry wholesale with no markup. Your domain does nothing differently for the extra money; it's a laziness tax on never moving it. Here's the markup broken down by TLD, why the first-year-cheap / renew-high model exists, the trade-offs of each at-cost option, and how to transfer a domain in ~20 minutes with zero downtime.
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