Comment by beebmam
3 years ago
It's not $20. It's $20 per year. I know that might be semantic for some people, but for much of these services, I wouldn't want it going away after 1 year if I'm unable to pay that cost again. And for that reason, I think it's worth noting.
These are ongoing services so a once off payment doesn't make sense for the business. The alternatives are self-hosting and free services, self hosting is great. If you are using free services though, they could disappear too, and you have to question the business model of anyone givingyou something for nothing.
At least if you are paying for it you are entering into a contract of service from the provider which gives you a lot of legal recourse and leverage and also supports the business so that they do keep providing you the service.
Domain registration has to be renewed, either per year or per <x> years if you buy a bunch of licenses up front. So what's the alternative to this then? A lot of domains can cost around $20 per year.
It is totally reasonable to charge a recurring fee for providing an ongoing service, but to be clear you are not buying a domain that needs registration. You are buying a subdomain of the domains that this company already owns. Some other sites give those away for free because there is no marginal cost per subdomain.
Which in the end is true for domains as well. Someone decides to sell subdomains of X, weather X is com or omg.lol.
Com could be free as well. The only real difference is choice.
Or to put it differently, you say it doesnt need registration. Well, it does. They require it. So what.
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I run a SaaS product and I do not charge my customers extra for a subdomain of their choice (if it has not been claimed by someone else already.)
> but to be clear you are not buying a domain that needs registration
Ah, good point.
> You are buying a subdomain of the domains that this company already owns.
All domains are like that, though, even TLDs.
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Creating a subdomain once you have the domain is free, probably for the domain omg.lol they're paying $20 / year.
omg.lol was probably a premium domain of some kind. Random three-letter .lols seem to go for about $150/yr (according to gandi).
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What if they offered a 'lifetime' rate which is the NPV of $20 over 20 years, so like $1000 or something? You pay once and get it forever.
Of course, only as long as they can operate the service forever...
That’s the main issue I see, they can stop the service at any time and then you’ll have no chance to get the subdomain back. You’re in a much better position with an actual second-level domain, because you can move the domain between service providers and registrars, and depending on locality you may also have actual legal rights to keep owning the domain.
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The thing with a domain registration is that you know if you pay for ten years in advance, you WILL have it for ten years. With most SaaS, you have absolutely no guarantee this is going to be the case.
You will have it for 10 years unless they decide to take it from you. That doesn't happen often, but it certainly can.
My domain is 26 per year. This is cheap af and I'm reconsidering ditching my domain in favour of this.
What if this service stops to exist after 2 years? Then any place you advertised/published this subdomain will need to be updated. With your own domain you won't have that issue, ever. Why would you give that up?