What a domain actually costs over five years

A domain is the cheapest thing in your stack and the only one you cannot replace without breaking every link that points at you. On published Porkbun pricing, a .com runs $55.40 over five years and a .io runs $235.32 — and the .io looks like the smaller decision at the moment you make it, because year one is on offer.

Porkbun pays me nothing. It is on the list because the registration price and the renewal price are the same number, which is the only feature that matters here.

What does five years actually cost?

All four from the same published price list, checked 5 October 2026.

The .com and the .net have no gap between registration and renewal. The .org has a small one. The .io has an 84% jump the moment the first year is over, and it is the one that gets picked for new projects because it reads as technical and the first-year price does not look alarming.

$180 over five years is not going to decide whether your business works. But it is the clearest example on this page of a pattern that will show up in every tool you buy: the advertised number and the recurring number are different, and only one of them is yours to live with.

Why is the renewal price the real price?

Because transferring a domain is possible, slightly tedious, and nobody does it.

There is a waiting period, an authorisation code, and a small risk of getting it wrong on something that every link you own depends on. A registrar that discounts the first year is not being generous — it is buying a customer who is, statistically, not going to move.

So the only number worth comparing is the one in the renewal column, and the only registrar feature worth caring about is that it is published at all.

What should you actually look for?

Four things, and none of them are features.

A published renewal price. If you have to log in to find out what next year costs, that is the answer.

Auto-renew that works, on a card that is current. This is the entire risk surface.

Free WHOIS privacy. Some registrars charge for not publishing your home address. Paying to not be listed is a strange product.

No upsell at the checkout. You need a domain. You do not need hosting, an SSL certificate, an email plan or a site builder bundled at the moment of purchase.

What is the thing that actually costs money?

Forgetting.

The domain is $11 a year. What points at it: every video description, every bio link, every email signature, every QR code, the PDF someone downloaded in March, and whatever a search engine has learned about you.

If it lapses, a link that used to go to your site goes somewhere else — and "somewhere else" for an expired domain with any traffic is usually an ad page. That costs more than five years of renewals in an afternoon.

One of those is a line item and the other is an incident. People research the first and never set up the second.

When should you buy more than one?

Rarely, and not for the reason it is usually sold.

Buying every extension of your name to stop someone else taking them is mostly a tax on anxiety. What is occasionally worth it: a second domain you actually intend to redirect, or the obvious misspelling if your name has one.

Both are a redirect, not a second site. If you find yourself maintaining two, you have bought a problem rather than protection.

Should you buy the domain before you have the product?

Yes, and this is the one case where moving early is cheap.

Eleven dollars buys you the ability to stop thinking about the name. The alternative — building something, naming it, and then finding the domain is parked by someone who wants four figures for it — costs an afternoon of renaming and every asset that already carries the old name.

What you should not do is buy eleven of them while deciding. Pick one, park it on a single page, and let it sit. A domain doing nothing costs $11 a year; a decision you keep reopening costs more than that in a week.

What about the free first-year domains?

They are real, and they are first-year.

Several hosts bundle a free domain with a paid plan — Vercel does it for paid Pro teams, for example, and not during the trial. It is a genuine saving and it comes with the same catch as every other first-year price: the year after, you are renewing at whatever that provider charges, inside a bill you took on for other reasons.

If the plan is something you wanted anyway, take the domain. If you are considering a paid plan because of the domain, you are paying a subscription to save eleven dollars.

Where the rest of the foundation costs land

The domain is the only piece of a small site with an unavoidable recurring bill. Hosting, email and analytics all have usable free tiers, and they have their own cliffs — free hosting until it is not is about where those sit, and what AI tools actually cost per month puts the whole stack together.

Where these numbers came from

Porkbun's published domain pricing, checked 5 October 2026, in US dollars, for non-premium single-year registrations and renewals. Five-year totals assume the offer price applies to year one only and the renewal price to years two through five.

Registrar prices move. The structure does not: look at the renewal column, turn on auto-renew, and spend the attention you saved on something that compounds.