Data
How a price gets onto this site, and what it is not
Every figure on this site comes out of one script that runs each morning and rebuilds the whole thing. This is what it does, including the parts that limit what the numbers are worth.
The currency rule
A price is kept only where it is stated in US dollars. A figure with no currency named, or one named in something other than the dollar, is dropped rather than converted. A euro shop price converted at today's rate is not what a US buyer is quoted, and a bare dollar sign on a page that never says which dollar is not evidence of anything.
There is one deliberate exception: a euro-denominated catalogue, converted at the European Central Bank's published reference rate, with the rate and its date shown on the method page. Everything else is USD as published.
Prices that are excluded on purpose
- Reseller and member-only pricing. Shown for reference where a source publishes it, never allowed to win a cheapest column. A price the public cannot buy at would make the comparison a lie.
- Zeroes. A zero usually means "not sold here" rather than free, so it is discarded unless the figure is an explicit $0.00 — which some registrars genuinely do on transfers.
- Implausible renewals. No registry renews a name for under a dollar. A record with a sub-$1 renewal is dropped whole, not field by field: a record that got one column that wrong cannot be trusted on the others.
The checks that fail the build
A build that produces wrong numbers is worse than one that does not run, so a second script tests the output before it ships. Among other things it refuses a build where a .com, .net or .org renewal comes out below the wholesale fee the registry itself charges; where an extension that costs hundreds everywhere suddenly reads cheap, which is the signature of a number parser truncating; where holding a name for ten years costs less than holding it for five; where the API disagrees with the table on any price; where the sitemap points at a page that was not written; or where a discounted price is rendered with no code beside it to reach it. Figures quoted in the site's own prose are checked against the data they describe, which is why nothing in these articles is typed in as a literal.
Each run also writes a dated snapshot of the cheapest prices, so a change can be attributed to a date rather than noticed vaguely.
What this site does not know
It prices 2,488 of 3,184 extensions; 696 have no price here at all, usually because nobody sells them at a price this build can read. Around thirty registrars are deliberately not used, each with the reason stated on the registrars page — a currency never named, VAT never clarified, wholesale-only tiers, or a headline that is really a three-year commitment.
There are no ratings here, no measure of support or reliability, no restore or redemption fees, and no record of any registrar's transfer-lock policy. Taxes are never included, because they depend on where you are. Coupon codes are collected, not tested.