domain total cost of ownership.

A domain is a subscription with no natural end date, so the price you pay once is the least interesting fact about it. Year one is the number you are shown; every year after it is the number you pay. The honest comparison is the renewal price multiplied by the years you will realistically hold the name, and five years is a reasonable default for anything attached to a real project: the first year plus four renewals. That is the figure owndle ranks on, because it is the one that survives contact with reality.

What belongs in it: the first-year price, every renewal at today's rate while remembering the rate can rise, the small fixed ICANN fee applied per year to gTLD registrations, WHOIS privacy where a registrar charges for it rather than including it, and any transfer costs. Transfers are usually neutral or better, since a gTLD transfer adds a year to the expiry at the destination's price rather than simply charging you a fee. And then there is the category people leave out until it happens to them: redemption restore fees, which are large enough to dwarf several years of renewals on a single lapse.

Two things change the answer more than anything else. The first is that the renewal spread between registrars on the same TLD is frequently larger than the entire first-year discount that attracted you, so a cheap registration attached to an expensive renewal loses within about two years and keeps losing — see teaser pricing. The second is the TLD itself, whose registry fee sets a floor you cannot shop around; a fashionable extension is a fixed annual charge you carry for the life of the project.

Per-domain arithmetic is mildly interesting. The portfolio total is the number that changes behaviour, because a single figure for the year makes it obvious which names are earning their keep, which are cheap enough to keep out of sentiment, and which are a standing charge on an idea abandoned three years ago. That is the actual decision in front of most portfolio owners: keep, transfer, sell, or let it go — and it is impossible to make sensibly while the cost is scattered across five registrar accounts.

To work it out: the price checker for a single name, the price pages for the cross-registrar picture on a TLD you hold a lot of, and the portfolio tracker if you would rather import everything and have it totalled for you. Once you can see the number, domain renewal arbitrage is what you do about it.