This same reason is why they are perfect for extortion. It’s personal so you will be emotionally motivated to fork over $850 on renewal. Plus if you’re a developer, you make good money, so they know you’re good for it.
...which is absolutely a stereotype born of the Silicon Valley bubble, and not actually true in practice.
The vast majority of developers do not work in Silicon Valley, nor for FAANGs (or whatever the abbreviation is nowadays), and do not make several hundred thousand a year or have highly valuable tech stock options.
I'm a developer making a decent but not extravagant living in a low-cost-of-living area, who's sick of the assumption that every developer is somehow rolling in disposable income.
I...might actually be interested in that. Less for the money (though that's always an enticement) than for the full remote, which I've been planning to push for in the very near future.
Supposedly they do it to discourage domain squatters, which makes some sense, because every .com or .net that's even remotely usable is held by some squatter and they would rather hold the domain for decades than sell it for anything less than thousands.
...which is absolutely a stereotype born of the Silicon Valley bubble, and not actually true in practice.
The vast majority of developers do not work in Silicon Valley, nor for FAANGs (or whatever the abbreviation is nowadays), and do not make several hundred thousand a year or have highly valuable tech stock options.