Most registrars compete on a first-year price designed to be forgotten by renewal time. Three don’t: Cloudflare, Porkbun and Spaceship publish flat, honest pricing where year five costs what year one cost. If you are moving domains away from a marked-up registrar, one of these three is almost certainly the destination — so here is the honest comparison, including each one’s catch.
| Registrar | 1st year | Renewal/yr | 5-year cost | WHOIS privacy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spaceship | $8.88 | $10.18 | $49.60 | Free |
| Cloudflare | $10.44 | $10.44 | $52.20 | Free |
| Porkbun | $11.08 | $11.08 | $55.40 | Free |
.com prices checked 24 October 2026. Five-year cost = first year + four renewals, before taxes.
Cloudflare: the at-cost benchmark
Cloudflare sells domains at exactly the wholesale cost — $10.44 for a .com — with zero markup, and has committed to keeping it that way. The catch is real: your domain must use Cloudflare’s DNS (free, and genuinely excellent), and Cloudflare Registrar does not support every TLD. If your site already sits behind Cloudflare, this is the default choice.
Porkbun: the best all-rounder
Porkbun charges a small, flat margin — $11.08 for registration, transfer and renewal alike — and in exchange gives you the friendliest dashboard in the business, free WHOIS privacy, and no conditions about where your DNS lives. For most people moving a handful of domains, the extra $0.64 a year over Cloudflare buys real convenience.
Spaceship: the cheapest seat in the house
Spaceship — Namecheap’s budget brand — currently posts the lowest numbers we track: $8.88 first year and a $10.18 total renewal. That total is a $9.98 list price plus the $0.20 ICANN fee charged at checkout, and it sits below Cloudflare’s $10.44 at-cost price because Spaceship subsidises the difference as a loss-leader to win customers. The interface is modern and privacy is free. Subsidised pricing may rise later, which is exactly why locking multi-year renewals now is worth considering — and why you should always verify the final total at checkout before paying.
How to move, whichever you pick
The process is the same at all three: unlock the domain at your current registrar, get the authorisation code, start the transfer at the new one, approve the email, and wait 5–7 days while everything keeps working. Our transfer vs renewal guide has the full checklist, and the comparison table shows how these three stack up against all 8 registrars we track.