[grayrest]

I worked for Squarespace 2010-2012 and the focus from management was mainly on keeping customers happy. It's not like it's ad focused and there's a need to extract maximum value from the userbase. It's possible that's changed in the last decade but Anthony (CEO) was really into having a premium product and a quick glance at the about page shows that most of the senior leadership hasn't changed so I don't see why they'd change direction.

[efficax]

going public and focusing on building a "platform" has definitely changed sqsp, although i wouldn't say they don't care about the customer experience anymore.

[WillPostForFood]

I appreciate they don't have a dozen stupid upsells on domains like GoDaddy. But $20 a year is a straight ripoff.

[nucleardog]

This comes up all the time when registrars come up...

"I just want a non-scummy registrar that doesn't try and upsell me, has support when I need it, and generally isn't shit."

"Why is this non-shitty registrar $20/yr instead of $10/yr like everyone else! Hell, I can go to Joe's Discount Domain Emporium and get this for _$8_!"

I guess I'd just really like to know, for the people that are looking at it like this... how many domains y'all buying? Because I have to assume it's "lots and lots" or else I don't know how to make sense of any of this.

The $10 difference literally couldn't get me a Big Mac meal these days. Maybe I'm just the super-privileged class to be able to afford an extra 83 cents a month, but I happily pay more for my domains to buy from non-scummy companies.

[qodeninja]

look at you, overpaying! how cute.

[nucleardog]

I pay AWS $13/yr when I could be paying... well, I can't even easily figure out what I'm spending elsewhere.

Godaddy is telling me $0.01 if I register three years up front, and it looks like year two and beyond are $23/yr? But if I bundle this with my other couple domains I get some sort of discount? Also they add the ICAAN fees and stuff after? So something like $16/yr over three years?

Domains.com looks like $10.99/yr once I managed to strip out the upsells.

Namecheap is telling me $6.98/yr with promo code FLASHCOM and I _think_ $13.98/yr after that?

Hover is still playing games but at least it's kind of clear--$14.99/yr up front, $16.99/yr after that.

Name.com is $10.99/yr, $12.99 renewal and they're pushing me to some sort of bundle discounts.

Spaceship is $7.88/yr, and I _think_ $8.80/yr on renewals?

Just trying to figure out the damn pricing on these sites is already stressing me out more than the loss of potentially around $6/yr.

Add to that that AWS isn't really a "registrar", they're a cloud company that lets you register domains. Their support isn't budgeted on the revenue from domain sales, it's budgeted on the $80b in cloud revenue. I've dealt with them before. They're excellent. AWS also has a pretty solid track record of supporting their products long term (SimpleDB is still here) so I have zero concern about waking up tomorrow and finding out that my registrar is shutting down.

My domain is what my entire online identity is tied to (via email). It sits between me and a bunch of (self-hosted) services I rely on. Even without the frustrating pricing and stuff, the $6 is worth it as insurance.

So no, I'm not overpaying. I'm paying a small premium for a product with a better process and better support and me not having to waste valuable brain space thinking about it or staying on top of whatever the hell my pricing is doing this year (though I guess I kinda messed that up getting into this conversation). If it weren't AWS, I'd have no problem paying Gandi $17/yr or Squarespace $20/yr.

[grayrest]

> $20 a year is a straight ripoff.

Low cost has never been the priority. If you don't value their service at $20/yr they have no problem with you going elsewhere.

[WillPostForFood]

Having a premium web hosting and web building service is great. Squarespace makes nice looking pages. But they are offering nothing special for the $20 premium for domain hosting. And really there is nothing to offer. Their DNS management UI is worse than Google's, and Google's is nothing special. I'm already in the process of moving domains - I don't want to be around for the transition.

[samspenc]

I thought this was $20 a year for hosting, and thought "that's cheap!"

But this is actually $20 a year for a domain, which is about 50-80% more expensive than most other domain hosting, including Google Domains.

[qodeninja]

well theyre not going to keep me happy with "$20-$70" domain renewals. Fuck all of that. I dont need any of their services.