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That's a good, but separate question. My point is an at cost registrar probably saves people 10% on a .org, which doesn't meaningfully increase access... If you can't afford $10/year, $9/year isn't really affordable either.

To your question though, I think PIR actually contracts out the operation of the registry to Affilias. I don't know what the current rate is, but before they renegotiated, they were paying about $3/domain to Affilias [1] based on a reported payment of $33M on just under 11 million domains.

I don't really know where the rest of the money goes. There were a lot of questions when PIR tried to sell .ORG to private equity in 2020, but I don't know if there was much follow up after the deal got quashed.

[1] https://domainnamewire.com/2016/11/14/org-sticks-afilias-bac...