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Cloudflare Launches a Low-Cost Domain Registrar, Which Will Also Offer Free Privacy To Customers (arstechnica.com)
Cloudflare, which is celebrating its eighth birthday has announced yet another service: an at-cost domain registrar. From a report: While Cloudflare had already been handling domain registration through the company's Enterprise Registrar service, that service was intended for some of Cloudflare's high-end customers who wanted extra levels of security for their domain names. The new domain registrar business -- called Cloudflare Registrar -- will eventually be open to anyone, and it will charge exactly what it costs for Cloudflare to register a domain. As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post this week, "We promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges." That includes the small fee assessed by ICANN for each registration.
Prince said that he was motivated to take the company into the registrar business because of Cloudflare's own experience with registrars and by the perception that many registrars are in the business mostly to up-sell things that require no additional effort. "All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain," Prince said. "That just involves sending some commands to an API. In other words, domain registrars are charging you for being a middle-man and delivering essentially no value to justify their markup." Charging overhead for that sort of service, Prince said, "seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." (Cloudflare also provides free SSL certificates.)
Prince said that he was motivated to take the company into the registrar business because of Cloudflare's own experience with registrars and by the perception that many registrars are in the business mostly to up-sell things that require no additional effort. "All the registrar does is record you as the owner of a particular domain," Prince said. "That just involves sending some commands to an API. In other words, domain registrars are charging you for being a middle-man and delivering essentially no value to justify their markup." Charging overhead for that sort of service, Prince said, "seemed as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." (Cloudflare also provides free SSL certificates.)
Do they still have the bit about terminating accounts at their sole discretion? Cloudflare got into the censorship business in 2017, can't say that I trust them in 2018.
I did my own research but you can just have fun looking at these two links and figuring it out for yourself; the highlights I noticed is that they respond to USA subpoenas, that they can but usually don't tolerate resource abuse, and follow US laws:
https://www.cloudflare.com/tra...
https://www.cloudflare.com/pri...
.de domains can be had for less than $2 a year, without bait-and-switch price hikes. The .de registry is operated as non-profit coop by network operators and hosters. The .de CC-TLD of Germany is the third largest TLD after .com and .cn.
If they are only charging customers the registry cost plus the ICANN fee as mentioned in the article, that means they are still operating at a loss if they 1) are accepting payment methods which cost money (i.e. credit cards, paypal, etc.) or 2) providing customer support to registrar customers. I would prefer they charged more to at least break-even since presumably they will do at least one if not both of these (they already accept credit cards for their other services). I have all my domains at NameSilo, which I really like, and while they charge a bit more than Cloudflare, at least I understand that they are making money and therefore NameSilo's domain registration service is sustainable.
I have used Cloudflare for years and really like them as well, but when a business announces pricing which would result in a loss or at best - not make any money, that makes me suspicious. I am left to assume they are counting on sales from their other services to make up for this - they are a business after all - beholden to investors who at some point expect ROI.
Cloudflare is stating "we promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges" - but that is not just a promise to "never" make money on domain registrations... if they are offering support for domain registrations or offer popular payment methods it is also a promise to always lose money on that part of their business. When a company makes a promise like that (i.e. unlimited bandwidth)... it calls for additional scrutiny. I'd be careful when considering Cloudflare for your domains - they have either not really thought this one through, or are rolling our their own bait and switch scheme.