[icebraining]

AFAIU, the ICANN New gTLD registry agreement means you can't have "premium" prices for renewals:

"Registry Operator must have uniform pricing for renewals of domain name registrations (“Renewal Pricing”). For the purposes of determining Renewal Pricing, the price for each domain registration renewal must be identical to the price of all other domain name registration renewals in place at the time of such renewal, and such price must take into account universal application of any refunds, rebates, discounts, product tying or other programs in place at the time of renewal."

REGISTRY AGREEMENT - 2.10 (b)

https://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/agreements/ag...

[jasonbarone]

Hmm, this definitely isn't the case for .app. There are numerous tiers of pricing as of right now. Google categorized specific names as "Premium", which you can see when searching for a lot of .app domains. These Premium domains vary in both initial purchase price AND the yearly renewal. One of my examples is in this thread. Purchase price was around $1000, yearly renewal is $280. Other names are even higher...

[icebraining]

Ah, yes, the (c) clause says they can charge you more if you agreed to it "at the time of the initial registration", but not after you have invested in the domain.

But I suggest people read the whole article themselves, I have no industry expertise.

[CydeWeys]

Premium names are common across the domain industry. Different registries handle them differently (some have an up-front cost whereas others like us use annually recurring), but the registrar you're using should be making it very clear what costs you're signing up for during the registration flow.