This site refreshes the price of every domain extension across registrars, every day. The Chrome UX Report tells us which extensions people actually load. Joining the two answers a question a price list alone cannot: does a cheap extension get used?
The short answer is yes — and that turns out to be the problem, not the finding. The extensions with the most real-world traffic are also the ones where the first year is a loss leader.
Cheaper extensions carry more sites
Group the 489 priced generic extensions by first-year price and take the median traffic in each group. The median falls at every step.
Median origins per extension, by first-year price
Median, not mean. One extension in the $8–15 band is .com, and a mean would report .com as if it were a property of its price. The mean is in the table.
Sources: TLD Stats registrar price index (cheapest available offer per extension, refreshed daily); Chrome UX Report top-origins list. Generic extensions only.
An extension under $3 carries a median of 1,803 origins. One over $30 carries 56. The mean tells you nothing here: the $8–15 band’s mean is 52,683 against a median of 202, because .com is in that band and one extension out of 154 moves it by a factor of 260.
Every priced generic extension
First-year price against origins measured. The vertical axis is logarithmic — the range is six orders of magnitude.
Sources: TLD Stats registrar price index (cheapest available offer per extension, refreshed daily); Chrome UX Report top-origins list. Generic extensions only.
The right half of the plot is flat. Of the 142 generic extensions priced above $15, nine reach a thousand origins, and the best of them — .travel at 3,505 — would not make the top forty. Below $15 the same threshold is cleared by 103 of 347. The lone point at the top is .com.
The bill arrives in year two
Now hold the same extensions up against their renewal price. Of the extensions with at least 5,000 live origins, these have the steepest step between year one and year two.
Renewal price ÷ first-year price
Extensions with at least 5,000 origins. Both prices are the cheapest offer across registrars, so the real multiple for any one buyer is usually worse.
Sources: TLD Stats registrar price index (cheapest available offer per extension, refreshed daily); Chrome UX Report top-origins list. Generic extensions only.
.site, .shop, .online and .store are four of the six most-used new generic extensions on the measured web. All four sit in the top five of this chart. The extensions people adopt are the extensions priced to be adopted once.
Read the two charts together and the mechanism is plain. A $2 first year is a customer-acquisition cost that the registry recovers from every renewal after it. It works: the traffic is real, and these are not parked names. It also means the published “from $1.54” price describes one year of a commitment most people keep for several.
How this was joined
- Price. The cheapest currently-available offer per extension in our own index, across every registrar we track. An extension a registrar has stopped selling is excluded, not carried forward at its last price.
- Traffic. Origins in the CrUX top-origins list — 17,628,280 in total. An extension with no origins is plotted at zero and excluded from the log scatter.
- Scope. Generic extensions only. Country extensions are priced by national registries under rules that have nothing to do with global adoption, and mixing them in would compare two different markets.
- The multiple is a floor. First-year and renewal prices are each the cheapest across registrars, and they are not always the same registrar. A real buyer at one registrar usually faces a bigger step than the number shown.