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In addition to your hardware/IT costs you have: -ICANN's fees to get started -ICANN's annual fees -ICANN's fee per registration -ICANN's variable fees (based on their expenses)

Then, you have to pay the "owner" of each TLD to be able to register .com, .me, .io, etc. It costs, for example, over $7.00 to Verisign each time Namecheap registers a .com unless they've arranged some other pricing. The bottom line is the $.98 promotion is quite a loss leader.