// methodology
where these numbers come from.
We publish tables that say a registrar is charging you more than it needs to. That is only worth reading if you can check how we got there, so here is the whole method — including what it does not cover.
prices verified 10 August 2026 · methodology
what we track
The catalog currently holds renewal prices for 70 TLDs across 18 registrars. Coverage is not uniform: some registrars are priced across most of the catalog, others across a handful. That unevenness is why 10 registrars have their own price page and the rest appear only inside per-TLD tables.
renewal prices, not registration prices
Every table on this site compares renewal cost. First year pricing is a marketing number — frequently below the registry fee, recovered later. Comparing registrars on it tells you who is running the best promotion, not who is cheapest to hold a domain with. Since most people keep a domain for years, the renewal price is the one that decides what it costs you.
sources
- Live registrar pricing. Porkbun publishes a public pricing API covering every TLD it sells, which we poll on a schedule and store with a timestamp.
- A seeded catalog. Most other registrars do not publish machine-readable pricing, so those figures were compiled by hand from public price lists. They are marked as seed data and are the weakest part of this dataset — they are accurate as compiled but do not update themselves.
- Registry data, for everything else. Expiry dates, registrar identity, nameservers and DNSSEC status come from each TLD’s authoritative registry over RDAP, not from scraping registrar dashboards.
Every page carries a line saying which of these it is showing, and when it was last verified. If a page says the price came from the seed catalog, treat it as a strong indication rather than a live quote, and check the registrar before you move a domain on the strength of it.
currency
Registrars quote in their own currency, so every price is converted to pounds when it enters the catalog. Pounds are therefore the stored unit and what the pages render by default. The switcher on any price page converts that stored figure into dollars or euros for display, using the same rate table the ingest uses — so a dollar price here is a double conversion and should be read as indicative.
Rates are updated by hand rather than pulled from a live feed, and the date they were last checked is shown next to the switcher whenever you are not viewing pounds. Some registrars — particularly UK and German ones — also quote before VAT, which we do not add.
None of that undermines what these pages are for. The number worth acting on is the gap between registrars, and a gap is proportional: it survives conversion, rounding and tax intact. Treat absolute figures as close, and the differences as reliable.
what we refuse to publish
A page only goes live when there is enough data behind it to answer the question its title asks:
- A TLD needs at least two tracked registrar prices to get a comparison page. One price compares nothing.
- A registrar needs at least 5 priced TLDs to get its own page.
- A head-to-head comparison needs both registrars to sell at least 8 of the same TLDs, which is why the comparison list is shorter than the number of possible pairings.
It would be trivial to generate every combination and fill the gaps with dashes. Those pages would rank for a while and tell nobody anything.
affiliate links
Some outbound registrar links are affiliate links, and we expect more of them to be over time. Two rules follow from that, and they are not negotiable:
- Ranking order is computed, never sold. Tables are sorted by price, ascending. No registrar can pay to move up, and there is no editorial override — the ordering comes straight out of the catalog.
- Affiliate links are marked as such in the markup, so search engines and anyone reading the page source can see which outbound links are monetised.
The business only works if the comparison is trustworthy. A site that shades its rankings toward whoever pays best is worth nothing to the person trying to decide where to renew, and they are the customer.
corrections
If a price here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say when it was fixed: hello@owndle.com. Registrar pricing changes without announcement, and seeded figures go stale in ways we will not always catch first.