Ask ten founders what a .net domain costs and nine of them will guess. That is the problem: .net is the internet's overlooked legacy extension — older than the web itself, still the world's fourth most popular TLD — and its renewal prices are quietly some of the most predictable in the business. The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive registrar is over $13 a year, every year, for the exact same domain. This post compares the live renewal prices and shows the transfer trick that cuts the bill to the floor.
The short answer: cheapest .net registrar in 2026
Prices checked 20–26 October 2026, USD, standard non-premium .net, before tax:
- Cheapest renewal overall: Spaceship at $11.40/year — and $4.98 for the first year with its promo, the lowest entry price of any major registrar.
- Cheapest at-cost renewal: Cloudflare Registrar at $11.86/year, the same price to register and renew, forever. No markup, no promo games.
- Best flat-rate alternatives: Porkbun and Dynadot, both $12.52/year to register, renew, and transfer, with free WHOIS privacy.
- Most expensive renewal: GoDaddy at $25.19/year — more than double Cloudflare for the identical domain. Namecheap is next at $18.78/year on renewal.
The gap that matters is the renewal column, not the first-year price. A $4.98 first year is worthless if year two costs $25.19. Over five years, the cheapest route costs about $57; the GoDaddy route costs about $116. Same domain, same registry, same DNS.
Live .net price comparison (October 2026)
Every figure below is a standard list price from the registrar's own price list or an independent tracker that reads those lists, checked 20–26 October 2026. Five-year totals assume registration in year one and renewal at the standard rate for years two to five.
Registrar | First year | Renewal / year | Transfer in | 5-year total | WHOIS privacy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Spaceship | $11.40 ($4.98 promo) | $11.40 | $11.40 ($5.94 promo) | $57.00 | Free |
Cloudflare | $11.86 | $11.86 | $11.86 | $59.30 | Free |
Porkbun | $12.52 | $12.52 | $12.52 | $62.60 | Free |
Dynadot | $12.52 | $12.52 | $12.52 | $62.60 | Free |
Namecheap | $12.98 | $18.78 | ~$12.48 | $88.10 | Free |
Amazon Route 53 | $17.00 | $17.00 | $17.00 | $85.00 | Free |
GoDaddy | $15.19 | $25.19 | — | $115.95 | Paid add-on* |
Sources: Costgoat registrar comparison (updated 20 October 2026); Affinco registrar pricing table (2026); HostList Cloudflare pricing check (26 October 2026); Dynadot official domain price list. *GoDaddy charges separately for full WHOIS privacy on many plans. Prices change — always confirm the renewal price in the cart before you pay.
Two things jump out. First, the four cheapest registrars sit within $1.12 of each other on renewal — $11.40 to $12.52. Second, the expensive half is not slightly more expensive: Namecheap renews 58% above Cloudflare, and GoDaddy renews 112% above it. That is the whole story of this post: .net has a hard price floor, and half the market charges far above it.
Why .net renewal prices cluster so tightly
Every registrar buys the same product from the same wholesaler. Verisign operates the .net registry — the database that holds every .net name — and has done so since acquiring Network Solutions. Verisign sets one wholesale price that every registrar pays, plus a $0.18–$0.20 ICANN fee per domain-year. Nobody can undercut that floor for long, and nobody needs to charge far above it.
Cloudflare makes the floor visible. Its registrar sells domains at cost: the wholesale registry price plus the ICANN fee, with zero markup, as its own FAQ states. Its .net price is $11.86 to register and $11.86 to renew, and it moves only when Verisign or ICANN changes their fee. That $11.86 is therefore the honest floor for a .net in late 2026 — and Spaceship's $11.40 sits just below it, meaning Spaceship sells .net at or slightly below its own cost as a loss-leader. Porkbun and Dynadot sit $0.66 above the floor: a small margin in exchange for no DNS lock-in. Namecheap and GoDaddy are not selling a different product — they charge for brand, for a first-year discount they must recoup, and, in GoDaddy's case, for an upsell funnel.
The four cheapest .net registrars, one by one
1. Spaceship — $11.40/year renewal, $4.98 first year
Spaceship, from the Namecheap group, is the cheapest .net renewal on the board at $11.40, and its first-year promo of $4.98 (one per customer) is the cheapest entry point anywhere. Transfer pricing is equally aggressive at $5.94 with a promo code. The trade-off is a newer, sparser interface, and the promo prices are explicitly limited — the standard $11.40 renewal is the price that matters, and it is still the lowest standard renewal available.
2. Cloudflare Registrar — $11.86/year, flat forever
Cloudflare is the registrar for people who never want to think about renewal pricing again. Register at $11.86, renew at $11.86, transfer in at $11.86. Free WHOIS privacy, one-click DNSSEC, and the domain lives in the same dashboard as Cloudflare's DNS, CDN, and SSL. The catch is real: you must use Cloudflare's nameservers — you cannot point a Cloudflare-registered domain at another DNS provider. One caveat: Cloudflare's price moves when the registry moves it. Verisign raised the wholesale .com price from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, pushing Cloudflare's .com to $11.17; .net's wholesale is set separately, so check the live list before you buy.
3. Porkbun — $12.52/year, flat, no lock-in
Porkbun charges $12.52 to register, renew, and transfer a .net — the same number in every column, year after year, with free WHOIS privacy and free SSL. It is $0.66 a year more than Cloudflare and $1.12 more than Spaceship, and in exchange you get a registrar that imposes no DNS lock-in and no first-year bait pricing. For most buyers this is the sweet spot: a fair price, a clean interface, and no conditions attached.
4. Dynadot — $12.52/year, flat, huge TLD range
Dynadot matches Porkbun to the cent on .net — $12.52 to register, renew, and transfer, per its official price list — with free privacy included. Where Dynadot wins is breadth: it lists over 800 extensions, so if your portfolio mixes .net with unusual TLDs, one dashboard covers everything. If you already hold domains at Dynadot, there is no reason to move a .net anywhere else.
The expensive half: Namecheap, GoDaddy, and Route 53
Namecheap looks reasonable at first: $12.98 for year one, in line with everyone else. The renewal is the problem — $18.78 a year according to Costgoat's 20 October 2026 check, a 45% jump the moment the promo year ends. Other trackers have reported Namecheap's .net renewal between $14.98 and $15.98 at various points in 2026, so the exact figure moves — but every source agrees on the direction: up, steeply, after year one.
GoDaddy is in a different league: $15.19 for year one and $25.19 at renewal. That is $13.33 a year more than Cloudflare, every year, for the same domain on the same registry — $133 extra over a decade. GoDaddy also charges separately for full WHOIS privacy on many plans, which the four cheap registrars include free.
Amazon Route 53 is the quiet expensive option: a flat $17.00 a year, no promos, no games — just $5 a year more than the floor, forever. It makes sense only if your infrastructure already lives on AWS and you value having the domain in the same console enough to pay for it.
The transfer trick: cut a $25 renewal to $11.40 in one move
Renewal pricing follows the registrar, not the domain. Moving a .net from GoDaddy to Spaceship or Porkbun is a standard ICANN transfer: it resets your renewal price to the new registrar's rate and adds a year to the registration.
- Unlock the domain at your current registrar and request the authorisation (EPP) code.
- Start the transfer at the new registrar and approve the confirmation email. The transfer typically completes in 5–7 days, and the domain keeps working throughout — DNS does not change unless you change it.
- One year is added to the registration when the transfer completes, so a transfer is effectively a renewal at the new registrar's price. Spaceship's $5.94 promo transfer is the cheapest way to do this; Porkbun and Dynadot charge their flat $12.52.
- Mind the 60-day lock. ICANN's rules block transfers within 60 days of a new registration or a previous transfer. If your .net was registered or transferred recently, wait out the window, then move.
Run the numbers on a GoDaddy .net: transferring to Spaceship at the $5.94 promo (or $11.40 standard) instead of renewing at $25.19 saves $13.79–$19.25 in year one, and $13.79 every year after. For a portfolio of ten .nets, that is over $130 a year for fifteen minutes of admin.
Is .net still worth registering in 2026?
Price is only half the question. The other half is whether .net still earns its place, and the registration data says yes — quietly. Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief for Q2 2026 counts 12.5 million .net registrations at 30 June 2026, and Verisign's own zone data puts the .net domain name base at 12,686,749 as of 3 November 2026. That makes .net the fourth most popular TLD in the world, after .com, .cn, and .de, out of 1,437 TLDs in the root zone. It added roughly 100,000 names in Q2 2026 alone. It is not growing fast — .com added about 3 million in the same quarter — but it is not shrinking either.
.net has been around since 1 January 1985, one of the original TLDs created alongside .com and .org, and the first .net ever registered was nordu.net, for the Nordic university network. It was originally intended for network providers, and that heritage still shapes how people read it: a .net signals infrastructure, technology, and networks in a way a .io or a .co does not. That makes it the natural fallback when the .com you want is taken — and, for network, SaaS, hosting, and developer-tool brands, sometimes the better first choice. Google has repeatedly confirmed that the TLD itself does not affect rankings, so the SEO question is settled: pick the extension your audience trusts and can remember.
When to choose .net: your brand is a network, hosting, SaaS, or developer product; the .com is taken by an active business and the .net is clean; or you want a legacy extension with a renewal floor under $12, which neither .io (about $50 a year to renew at Cloudflare) nor .ai (about $70) can offer. When not to: if the .com is available for a similar price, take it — 166.6 million .com registrations against 12.5 million .net means your audience will type .com from muscle memory.
Whichever you choose, do the one check that matters before you pay: open the cart and read the renewal price, not the first-year price. Registrars compete on year one and profit on year two onwards. The table above is your baseline — if a checkout shows a renewal far above it, you are looking at the trap, not the deal.
Once you have the name, check it against the wider picture: our .net domains guide covers what the extension is good for, the full TLD price list compares .net with 903 extensions, and our cheapest registrars roundup applies the same renewal-first test to every major TLD.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest .net domain registrar in 2026?
Spaceship has the cheapest standard .net renewal at $11.40 a year, with a $4.98 first-year promo. Cloudflare Registrar is the cheapest at-cost option at $11.86 a year to register and renew. Porkbun and Dynadot both charge a flat $12.52. Prices checked 20–26 October 2026.
How much does a .net domain cost per year?
A standard .net costs $11.40–$12.52 a year at the cheapest registrars, and $17–$25.19 a year at the expensive ones. The floor is set by Verisign, the .net registry operator, plus a $0.18–$0.20 ICANN fee.
Why is GoDaddy's .net renewal so expensive?
GoDaddy charges $25.19 a year to renew a .net, against $11.86 at Cloudflare, for the identical domain on the same Verisign registry. The premium pays for brand, marketing, and an upsell-heavy checkout. Transferring the domain to a flat-rate registrar resets the renewal price immediately.
Can I transfer my .net to a cheaper registrar?
Yes. Unlock the domain at your current registrar, get the authorisation (EPP) code, and start a transfer at the new registrar. The transfer adds a year to the registration and typically completes in 5–7 days, with no downtime. ICANN's 60-day lock blocks transfers within 60 days of registration or a previous transfer.
Does Cloudflare Registrar require Cloudflare DNS for .net?
Yes. Cloudflare Registrar requires domains to use Cloudflare's nameservers. That is the trade for at-cost pricing. If you need DNS elsewhere, Porkbun or Dynadot at $12.52 a year is the closest no-strings alternative.
Is .net good for SEO?
The TLD itself does not affect Google rankings — Google has confirmed that new and legacy gTLDs are treated the same. What matters is the domain's memorability, the site's content, and its links. .net's practical drawback is user behaviour: with 166.6 million .coms against 12.5 million .nets, some visitors will type .com from habit.
How many .net domains are registered?
There were 12.5 million .net registrations at 30 June 2026, according to Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief for Q2 2026, and Verisign's zone data counted a .net domain name base of 12,686,749 on 3 November 2026. That makes .net the world's fourth most popular TLD.
Is .net better than .com for a tech startup?
Usually not as a first choice — .com is the default people type and remember. But .net is a strong pick when the .com is taken, or when the brand is explicitly about networks, infrastructure, or developer tools, where .net's 1985 heritage reads as credibility rather than compromise. It also renews far cheaper than .io or .ai.
