[trinix912]

While I'm usually one of those who complain about subscription services, $20 per year is not considerably more than registering a .com with the whois protection. Given that you get a registered, valid domain name that you have control over, it's not a bad deal. Also, it does help filter out low effort spam, especially if they decided to add a limit to allow only n registrations per a credit card should it become a problem.

We're always discussing something along "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" in the context of social media, yet now we're presented a solution and criticize that it's not free.

You can also roll your own webring/directory for free on your ISP's guest area (if they still offer that) and there's no significant network effect to url.town yet that would make you miss out if you don't pay.

[reddalo]

> ISP's guest area (if they still offer that)

What is (was) it? I can't find anything with a search (too many unrelated results).

[endemic]

Back in the day you could sometimes get hosting from your ISP. You might see URLs like `www.isp.com/~username` as examples of this.