Cheap today.
Expensive forever.

TrueTLD (truetld.com) compares domain extension prices across 44 registrars, showing what each one actually costs to keep — not just the discounted price you pay to sign up. Registration price often has little to do with what you'll pay at renewal; we calculate the real 3- and 5-year cost so you can see that before you buy.

A TLD, or top-level domain, is the part of a web address after the final dot — the "com" in truetld.com. Some are generic (.com, .org, .shop), some belong to countries (.de, .in, .io), and a few are owned by single companies.

Most registrars discount the first year to win the sale, then charge the standard rate from year two onward. The registry sets a wholesale price the registrar cannot go below long-term, so a $0.98 first year on a domain that wholesales near $40 has to correct at renewal. The first-year price tells you almost nothing about what the domain costs to own.

First-year price at the cheapest registrar, plus four years at the cheapest renewal price available. We do not assume you stay at one registrar, because transferring is usually allowed after 60 days and often cheaper than renewing in place.

They describe how far the renewal price sits above the registration price. Safe is roughly flat. Caution is a meaningful step up. Trap is a jump large enough that most buyers would not have chosen the extension had they seen it upfront. The exact thresholds are published on our method page.

We pull live prices from registrar APIs and public pricing pages, normalize everything to a common currency, and compare each extension's renewal price against its registration price to assign a safe, caution, or trap verdict. See our full method →

Often, yes. A transfer adds a year to your expiry, so it functions as a renewal at a different registrar's price. Where a transfer costs less than renewing where you are, moving saves money on every cycle. Transfers usually require the domain to be at least 60 days old and unlocked, with an EPP code from your current registrar.

No, and this trips people up. Country-code extensions in particular are carried by only a handful of registrars. Where a registrar does not offer an extension we show "not offered" rather than leaving the cell blank, so you can tell the difference between a missing price and a missing product.

Every four hours for the most-searched extensions, daily or weekly for the long tail. Every row shows when that specific registrar was last checked, so you can see the age of any figure rather than having to trust it.

Google treats generic extensions equally, so .com carries no ranking advantage over .shop or .dev. Country-code extensions are the exception: they can help you rank in that country and can hold you back elsewhere. The bigger practical effect is trust — people still type .com by reflex.

Yes. Every extension and every registrar price is free with no account. We earn a commission when you register through a link on the site, which does not change the price you pay and does not affect how we rank or grade anything.