The first year is the advert.
The renewal is the price.

01Why the first year is cheap

Every ending has a registry — Verisign for .com, Identity Digital for .io, and so on — which charges registrars a wholesale price for each year of each name. Registrars sell on top of that. To win the registration, registries run promotions on the first year and registrars discount it further, sometimes below cost; the money comes back at renewal, when moving a name elsewhere is effort most owners never spend.

So the first-year price is marketing, and the renewal price is the rent. For some endings they are the same number. For others the first year is a few dollars and every year after it is thirty, or three hundred.

02The renewal trap, measured

This page calls the difference the renewal trap: the renewal price minus the first-year price, in dollars (Trap $) and as a share of the first year (Trap %). Ranked by dollars, the list shows where a name will hurt most to keep; ranked by percent, it shows where the advertised price is furthest from the real one — usually a first year discounted almost to nothing.

A handful of endings renew for less than they cost to register. That is shown in green and is not a trap; it usually means the first year carries a registry fee that renewals do not.

03Ten years, honestly

The five- and ten-year figures follow one rule, stated wherever they appear: one first year, then every later year at today's renewal price — so ten years is the first-year price plus nine renewals. It is an estimate, and a generous one, because renewal prices move and have mostly moved up: Verisign's wholesale price for .com has risen several times since 2021, and registries of newer endings can change theirs with notice. Nothing on this page predicts a future price.

Paying for several years at once does not usually change the sum: registrars charge the renewal price for each year after the first.

04Why one registrar, and which

Porkbun publishes its whole price list as a free, public API that needs no account — which is why it is the list read here. It is one registrar's prices. Others charge differently, sometimes very differently, especially for first-year promotions; the renewal gap is usually a registry's doing and so tends to follow an ending from registrar to registrar, but the dollar figures do not.

A premium name — one the registry has priced individually, often a short word — costs what the registry says, not what the list says. Transfers are shown as Porkbun lists them; where it lists a transfer at $0.00, that is what its list says, and some registries (Nominet's .uk, for one) do not charge for moving a name. There are no affiliate links here, to Porkbun or anyone.

05Handshake names

Some of the endings on Porkbun's list are Handshake names — endings in a separate, blockchain-run naming system rather than in the root that ICANN and IANA maintain. Ordinary browsers and public resolvers do not resolve them. They are counted separately here and left out of the rankings unless you ask for them, so a cheap Handshake ending is never mistaken for a cheap ordinary one.

06How this page works

1. This site's server asks Porkbun for its price list — one request, about eighty kilobytes — and keeps the answer for a day.
2. If Porkbun cannot be reached, the last copy is served instead and the page says it is stale, with the time it was fetched.
3. Everything else — the traps, the ranking, the sums, the sorting — is arithmetic done in your browser on that one list.
4. A domain in the field is reduced to its ending with the Public Suffix List, so shop.example.co.uk is priced as .co.uk.