Namecheap ain't so cheap

Look, Namecheap has been good to me over the years, I won't deny it. But I've stood by, lazily watching domain prices slowly creeping upwards, until I decided it was high time to consolidate them all under Cloudflare's roof.

You know, the fresh darling of domain peddling, that Cloudflare. After much hemming and hawing - with a dash of procrastination - on my part, the deed was done. All two of my Namecheap domains were now safely under the banner of the Flare In The Cloud.

Wait - I hear you cry - are you seriously waxing poetic about two measly domains? Why yes I am, my dude(tte)! You see, while you may regard yourself as a professional domain wrangler, for me this is as rare an occurrence as Haley's comet making an appearance.

Enough hyperbole! To get down to brass tacks, I moved a .dev (this very site in fact) and a .app. Here are some numbers:

Cloudflare prices include the ICANN fee.

As you can see, I'm saving almost $7 / year for a .dev domain, and almost $5 / year for a .app domain. Obviously it's an insignificant amount for 2 domains, but it adds up when you have many. Besides, it really grinds my gears to pay money for nothing - in fact less than nothing, because Cloudflare comes with some free added perks.

Right off the bat, you'll notice that Cloudflare sells domains at cost, and it doesn't pull a first year so cheap bait & switch like other registrars.

Arguably, Cloudflare's DNS is better than average, though it's all the same to me as I don't do any complex stuff with my domains.

While most registrars worth giving a damn offer free WHOIS redaction, it's worth pointing out that so does Cloudflare.

But wait, there's more! The bee's knees - nay, the cat's pajamas - of bundled features is the free traffic analytics for every domain you own on Cloudflare. That's right, for small websites (like this blog) you no longer need the awkwardly bloated baggage of Google Analytics or some other paid service. Just turn on the built-in analytics and you're off to the races. Granted, the free tier is pretty basic, but it makes me super happy that I can see the stats I care about: daily visits and page views, countries of origin, referrers, browsers/operating systems/device types, most popular pages, and even web vitals (page load times, etc).

Finally - and very subjectively - I prefer Cloudflare's domain management UI and the overall functional/brutalist design aesthetics.

If this is starting to smell like a big fat ad, I can assure you it's not, though I will happily take Cloudflare's money if they send some my way. We are, however, fortunate to live in an era of broad choice in domain registrars, as well as solid price and feature competition.

Takeaway

Cloudflare's core business is not domain registration, but this makes it possible for them to sell domains at cost, while also bundling a lot of related features that would cost quite a few buckaroos with other companies, aside from the inflated price of the domain itself. But just as the universe is in a state of increasing entropy, so is the eventual enshittification of every good product or service. Until then, I'll enjoy the superior experience and save a chunk of cash with the Flare In The Cloud.

Literally hours later...

... as I signed in for work, I saw this email from Namecheap announcing a price increase on a few TLDs, including .dev and .app.

To be fair, this is an upstream Registry wholesale price increase that will affect all resellers including Cloudflare. Here's a comparison for the TLDs I care about:

In the end, there's still a $5 gap here that I would rather not pay.

But wait, there's (even) more!

Later in the day I came across an older Cloudflare announcement about yet another free feature, this time for blocking AI bots.

Outstanding! It's exactly what I wanted to do programatically, though it would have been quite an undertaking. Thankfully Cloudflare made it a simple toggle switch, so I turned it on for all my domains.