// domain glossary
teaser pricing.
Teaser pricing is the registrar practice of selling a domain's first year far below its renewal price — frequently below cost — to win the customer, then recovering the margin on every renewal that follows.
The first-year price is a customer acquisition cost. The renewal price is the business model. Once you understand that a registrar is buying you rather than selling you a domain, the entire structure of domain pricing stops being confusing: the number in the advert is chosen to win a comparison, and the number you pay for the next decade is chosen because nobody is comparing.
It works for the obvious reason. The first-year price is the only figure visible at the point of decision, renewal pricing is often a click away or absent entirely, and by the time year two arrives the domain has a website on it, mail flowing through it and DNS records nobody wants to touch. This is renewal shock: the invoice is several times what you remember paying, and the effort required to avoid it feels larger than the amount at stake — which is exactly the calculation the pricing is designed to produce.
Seeing through it requires one piece of arithmetic. Compare renewal prices, not first-year prices, or better, compare the total across the years you will realistically hold the name. A near-free first year attached to an expensive renewal loses to a flat middling price within about two years, and keeps losing after that. Domain total cost of ownership sets out how to work the number, and the price checker shows registration and renewal side by side so the gap is not hidden.
Registries play the same game one level up. New TLDs frequently launch with promotional wholesale pricing and raise it once there are enough registrations to make leaving painful, and registry agreements typically permit contractual price increases on a schedule — Verisign's .com agreement, for instance, allows rises in four years out of every six. A cheap renewal today is a statement about today. It is not a promise about year five.
The remedy for teaser pricing is not to chase the next teaser, which just means moving every domain every year. It is domain renewal arbitrage: find the registrar that is cheap at renewal, move once, and stay put. Compare who that actually is on the price pages.
// stop checking one at a time
knowing the terms is the easy part.
Owndle tracks every domain you own across every registrar — what each one costs to renew, what you would save moving it, and when it expires. Free for your first ten domains.
start free — 10 domains →// no card · magic-link sign-in · alerts at 90/30/7/1 days