What a domain costs after year one

A .shop domain costs about a dollar to register for the first year at wholesale. It costs about thirty dollars to renew. A .co is under five dollars in year one and thirty after. A .cafe is six, then forty. These are the registry-side costs a registrar pays, taken from BetterNamer's pricing catalogue as of August 2026; the retail price you see at any registrar sits above them. The pattern is the point: on most of the extensions introduced since 2012, the price that gets you in is not the price you pay to stay.

Teaser pricing, by the numbers

BetterNamer keeps a catalogue of 2,052 top-level domains with wholesale register, renew and transfer costs for each. Sorting it by the ratio of renewal to first-year cost tells the story better than any argument about which extension is "best". A selection, rounded, wholesale, one-year terms:

The legacy extensions (.com, .net, .org) and the country codes (.us, .uk, .ca) renew at or near what they cost to register. The newer generic extensions are where the gap opens, because their registries compete for first-year volume with promotional pricing and recover it at renewal, when the domain has a website on it and the owner is not going to let it lapse over twenty dollars.

None of this makes a .shop a bad choice. It makes the first-year price the wrong number to compare on. Compare renewals, and assume you will pay the renewal for as long as the business exists.

When .com still matters

The case for .com has nothing to do with prestige and everything to do with what people type. Someone who hears a brand name and goes looking for it will try the .com first; if that lands on a parked page or a competitor, a fraction of them stop there. Email addresses at a .com are read as normal; email from a .xyz is, fairly or not, read more carefully by spam filters and by recipients.

That makes .com worth having for a consumer brand, a business that will be spoken about more than it is linked to, or anything where the name will appear on a sign or a podcast ad. BetterNamer's scoring reflects this directly: when a name's best available extension is .com, the score gets a small lift (about two percent); when the only available extensions are weak ones, it is trimmed by a similar amount. The nudge is deliberately small, because the name itself matters more than the suffix.

It matters less for a developer tool, an internal product, or anything whose audience arrives by link rather than by typing. Those businesses live happily on .io, .dev, .app and .ai, and their customers do not notice.

When .io is a trap

.io had a decade as the default extension for software startups, and it carries two costs the name suggests nothing about. The first is price: fifty dollars a year wholesale, five times a .com, with no promotional first year. The second is that it is a country code, assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, and the territory's sovereignty was the subject of a 2024 agreement between the United Kingdom and Mauritius. Country-code domains have been retired before when the country ceased to exist (.yu for Yugoslavia, .su for the Soviet Union, which survived only by exception), and while there is no announced plan to retire .io and strong commercial reasons to keep it, a business building a brand for the next twenty years should at least know the extension's status depends on a process it does not control.

.ai has the same country-code status (Anguilla) with a two-year minimum registration and a wholesale cost around eighty dollars a year. It has become the extension for anything AI-related, which means the good names went years ago and what remains is priced accordingly.

Reading the long tail

Past the top fifty extensions, the catalogue is mostly extensions almost nobody registers, and that is not a reason to avoid them. A .coffee for a roaster, a .photography for a studio, a .law for a firm: these are descriptive, memorable, and usually available as the exact name you want. The checks to run before choosing one:

1. The renewal price, not the registration price. .law is about $80 a year wholesale in both directions, which is fine if you know it. .cafe is $6 then $40, which is only fine if you know it.
2. Whether the registry restricts who can register. Some extensions (.law, .bank, .pharmacy, most country codes) require credentials or a local presence, and an order that passes the availability check can still be rejected by the registry. BetterNamer collects the registry's required registrant data before payment for the extensions it sells, and drops an extension from sale when it cannot supply what the registry demands.
3. Whether privacy protection is available. Nearly three in four extensions in the catalogue do not support WHOIS privacy, which means the registrant's contact details are published in the registry's directory. Most country codes are in that group; .com, .net, .org, .io, .co and .app are not.
4. Whether the extension is priced as a premium. Registries reserve short or dictionary names in their extension and price them individually, sometimes in the thousands. A premium name shows a different price at checkout than the extension's standard rate, and renews at the premium rate too.

A sensible default

For a business that will be spoken about: get the .com if it is available, and treat the name as unavailable if the .com is held by an active business in a related field, whatever other extensions are free. For a product that lives on the web and arrives by link: .app, .dev, or .io are fine, and the renewal prices are predictable. For a local business with a descriptive extension: check the renewal and the registry rules, then enjoy having the exact name.

And for any extension at all, read the second price before the first one.