Transfers
What moving a domain costs, and when moving it is the cheaper plan
Every extension page here carries three prices: registration, renewal and transfer. The third is the one nobody reads, and it is the one that decides what a name costs over five years.
A transfer is a year, not a fee
At every registrar this site tracks, an inbound transfer adds a year to the registration. You do not pay to move and then pay again to keep the name — the transfer price is that year. That is what makes moving worth arithmetic rather than inertia: the question is not "what does moving cost", it is "is a year here cheaper than a year there".
Transfer prices sit close to renewal prices, and sometimes below them. On .com the cheapest renewal on the board is $9.98; the cheapest transfer reads Free. Some registrars publish $0.00 transfers across most of their catalogue, and where a source states an explicit zero the cell says so. Everywhere else a zero means "not sold here" and is dropped rather than shown as free.
The sixty-day wait
A name has to be 60 days old before it can move. A transfer is therefore not a way out of a first-year price you have just paid; it is something you set up before the first renewal falls due, not the week after you buy.
Beyond that, this site holds no registrar-by-registrar lock, auth-code or approval policy — there is no such column in the data, and inventing one would be worse than leaving it out. Read the losing registrar's own terms before you commit to a date.
The split plan
Because a transfer adds a year, the cheapest way to hold a name for five years is often not a single registrar. Register year one where the first year is cheapest, transfer to whoever renews cheapest before that year is out, then renew there for the remaining three. Each extension page works out both totals — staying put, and splitting — and shows the split only when it wins by at least a dollar.
It wins on 540 of the 2,488 extensions this site prices. The median saving among those is $8.80 across five years, which is not worth a calendar reminder for most people. The tail is where it matters: on .bank the split comes out $652.64 cheaper. Expensive extensions and extensions with one aggressive discounter produce the gaps worth acting on; a $30-a-year extension sold at similar prices everywhere does not.
The dollar threshold is deliberate. Below it the two plans are the same price, and calling the difference a saving would be noise dressed as advice.
What the split does not price in
- Tax. No published price on this site includes it, because it depends on where you are.
- Effort. Two registrars, two renewal dates, two sets of billing details. That is a real cost and this site cannot put a number on it.
- Service. There are no ratings here, and no data on how any registrar behaves when something goes wrong. The comparison is a price comparison and nothing else.
- Code conditions. Some transfer prices are reached with a coupon, and some of those codes only apply to transfers away from one named registrar. Where a price depends on a code, the code is printed beside it.
When staying put is the right answer
On most extensions it is. If one registrar is cheapest to register at and cheapest to renew at, there is nothing to do. If the gap is under a dollar, there is nothing worth doing. And if you hold dozens of names, one renewal date beats three dollars.
Where the gap is not small, the extension's own page names the two registrars and the total. The cheapest extensions to own ranks on the lower of the two plans, which is the honest figure to compare on.