The .COM domain will also increase in price this year

Although we have stated on this blog for the past three summers that the price increase for the .com domain would stop in 2024, the registrar of this top-level domain decided to proceed with the price increase this year. This means that on September 1st, the .com domain will become more expensive, which is why we suggest registering or renewing your domain at the current rate immediately.

We hoped that we wouldn’t have to repeat this blog article again, which was already starting to get old previously, but that hope was crushed when Verisign, which runs the .com top-level domain registry, announced an increase in prices at the start of autumn. A break in the price increase has been promised for next year, but nothing in this world is certain, so we won’t set this promise in stone just yet. We’ll see how it goes.

For our customers, the price increase means that starting from 1 September, an additional fee will be charged for both registration and renewal of the .com domain, which should be less than one euro without VAT. To avoid a further price increase, we recommend that you register or renew your domain for a maximum of 10 years before the specified date.

To shed some light on the reasons behind the .com price increase, let us provide some context.

Until 2021, the .com domain enjoyed nearly nine years of price stability, but then US domestic politics intervened, specifically the worldview conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, which was expressed in Donald Trump’s desire, after being elected president in 2016, to cancel or reverse the majority of the laws enacted by his then-predecessor Barack Obama. Among other things, the law requiring the freezing of the .com domain price increase in 2012 was revoked.

Under pressure from the Trump administration, Verisign and the Internet Resources Authority (ICANN) agreed that the price of the .com domain would begin to rise by 7% per year starting in 2021. To avoid upsetting the market, it was kindly agreed that price increases would be paused in 2024 and 2025. However, Verisign’s pricing increases may resume in 2026 to 2029. Thus, in 2030 we could be faced with a .com domain that is nearly half as expensive as it was a few years ago.

However, Verisign revealed this year’s pricing increase along with its 2023 financial results. The company’s revenue for 2023 was $1.49 billion. Although the number of managed domains declined this year, last year’s 7% price increase helped boost income by 4.8%.

Although Democrat President Joe Biden took office in 2020, he has not used his power in politics to stop the price increase. According to early data, if the current US government or the new US government that takes office the next year does not intervene, the price effective 1 September should be stable for a couple of years. Again – we’ll see what happens.

As positive news, we can say this year that the cost of registering and renewing a .EU domain remains low. If the reader is willing to wait until September, we will offer the registration of a new .EU domain for a fee of only 1 euro (+VAT) next month.

You can register a new domain on our website.