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 (384 price rows, each row flagged for ICANN-fee handling and currency), verifiedAt 2026-08-20 from official registrar pricing pages — and computed the honest number the checkout page never shows you: the year-1 → year-2 jump on a .com, plus the ten-year total that actually predicts your bill. This article shows the ranking, explains why the percentage alone can mislead, and publishes the capture methodology so you can check our math.
The ranking (a .com, year 1 → year 2)
| Registrar | Year 1 | Renewal | Jump | Renewal in USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS | $1.00 | $20.00 | +1900% | $20.00 |
| GoDaddy | $11.99 | $23.19 | +93% | $23.19 |
| Namecheap | $9.19 | $13.55 | +47% | $13.55 |
| OVHcloud | €7.78 | €10.07 | +29% | ≈ $10.88 |
| Spaceship | $8.44 | $10.75 | +27% | $10.75 |
| Dynadot | $9.37 | $10.67 | +14% | $10.67 |
| Gandi | €10.52 | €11.90 | +13% | ≈ $12.85 |
| Hover | $14.81 | $15.77 | +6% | $15.77 |
| Porkbun | $10.11 | $10.68 | +6% | $10.68 |
| NameSilo | $10.18 | $10.47 | +3% | $10.47 |
| Cloudflare Registrar | $9.15 | $9.15 | 0% | $9.15 |
| Squarespace Domains | $20.00 | $20.00 | 0% | $20.00 |
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 ($1 + 9×$20). 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% — all captured in the same 2026-08-20 sweep and living in the same catalog you can inspect inside the TCO tool. IONOS is not alone; it is just the most legible example of a market-wide pattern where the first-year discount is funded by the renewal.
Percent versus dollars: why both numbers matter
A high percentage jump is not automatically the worst deal, and a low percentage is not automatically good — because percentages scale with the base. GoDaddy's +93% looks scarier than Namecheap's +47%, but GoDaddy renews at $23.19 while Namecheap renews at $13.55. In absolute dollars, GoDaddy costs $9.64 more per year every year after year one, despite the smaller-looking surge in the table's comparison of IONOS vs Squarespace. Conversely, Hover at +6% and Porkbun at +6% look equally flat, but Hover's renewal is $15.77 while Porkbun's is $10.68 — a $5.09 annual gap hidden behind an identical percentage. The number that predicts your future bill is the absolute renewal price (or better, the normalized USD renewal — we convert EUR rows at the fixed 1.08 hint from `fx.ts`, as-of 2026-08-20, so Gandi's €11.90 correctly compares as ≈$12.85, not as "eleven-ish dollars"). The jump percentage just tells you how much of year one was marketing; the absolute renewal tells you how much of year two will be real. Our compute engine stores both: `renewalHikePct` for the shape of the promo and `annualRenewalUsd` for the sortable truth.
What flat pricing looks like
Methodology: 384 rows without guessing
The catalog is not a scrape with marketing copy pasted in. For 12 registrars (Cloudflare, Porkbun, Spaceship, Dynadot, NameSilo, Namecheap, Gandi, OVHcloud, Hover, Squarespace, IONOS, GoDaddy) we captured 32 high-demand TLDs each — .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .pro, .dev, .io, .ai, .app, .co, .store, .online, .site and eighteen more — producing 384 price rows. Each row stores year1Price, renewalPricePerYear, transferPrice, currency (USD or EUR for Gandi/OVHcloud), and an icannFeeIncluded boolean (352 rows inclusive, 32 GoDaddy rows exclusive — more on that in the ICANN fee piece). Prices were hand-verified from official registrar pricing pages on 2026-08-20 and carry provenance notes; where a transfer price was not published we record the absence rather than substituting the registration price silently — the compute layer notes it explicitly. Our ranking engine (`domain-tld-compute.ts`) consumes the catalog directly: ten-year TCO = year1Cost + renewalAnnual × (years−1), and `renewalHikePct` uses the formula above, with a free-first-year ($0 entry) correctly rendered as ∞ (unbounded) rather than 0% — details in the infinite-markup article. EUR amounts are normalized to USD at the single fixed hint EUR→USD 1.08 from `src/lib/fx.ts` (FX_AS_OF 2026-08-20), so sorting never mixes currencies, while the UI still shows native euros beside their USD equivalent.
- Normalize before sorting: compare annualRenewalUsd, not raw euro versus dollar strings — otherwise OVHcloud's €10.07 looks cheaper than it is by ~8%.
- Read the ten-year total, not just year two: a shallow promo on a high base (Squarespace $20 flat) can still lose to a steeper promo on a low base over a holding period.
- Check the transfer-out cost before factoring promos: the standard 60-day lock after registration means year one is sunk, and hopping registrars later adds a transfer fee plus a fresh year.
- Filter by what matters to you: at-cost wholesale, EU-sovereign billing, free WHOIS privacy, or WebAuthn 2FA — our tool marks filtered-out registrars ineligible with a reason instead of silently hiding them.