What Do Domains “At Cost” Mean at Porkbun?

When it comes to domain pricing, you’ll see they vary when you compare Porkbun vs GoDaddy vs Cloudflare and others. Here at Porkbun, we’re happy to say we offer hundreds of domains at cost! But what does that mean, exactly?

The Breakdown of Selling Domains At Cost

Basically it means we don’t make money on domains! Sure, we’re a business, but we believe in giving our customers the best prices possible wherever we can. This is why we have full pricing transparency on domain registrations, renewals, and transfers. 

Here is what that looks like for Porkbun domains at cost:

If You Sell Domains At Cost, Are You Sustainable?

Don’t worry, we’re able to not only keep the lights on but we’re a growing and stable registrar despite our tiny or non-existent margins on domain names. You don’t have to worry about us being a passing fancy — Porkbun is here to stay and growing larger every day as people make the switch from GoDaddy and other registrars. At the time of this publishing, we’ve got more than 400,000 active customers and nearly 3 million domains under management.

Do Other Registrars Sell Domains At Cost?

There is a very large and reputable DNS Provider — rhymes with Clownflair — that also sells domains at cost. However, something about being a publicly traded company valued over $45 billion USD allows them to not count credit card fees as a cost. So their pricing sometimes beats ours by a small amount even if neither of us are adding any markup.

Those credit card fees are a hard cost for us, our couch cushions simply aren’t big enough to hide that much loose change in them. But for most people, they aren’t the right domain registrar, and if you trust us to set our bias aside, we can explain why folks are choosing Porkbun vs Cloudflare.