Namecheap wtf ?
 

howdie , just a hello from an older webmaster from austria, i noticed
namecheap now is raising renewal prices out of the blue for some exotic extensions without any warning. i had some 5 or 6 letter .club domains with them for years with them and now without any warning
the renewal price were raised from 12$ to 300$ or even 400$ without any warnings. is this a usual practice nowadays ?
does namesilo do stuff like this as well ? im so pissed off, ill think about moving my 100+ domain portofolio completly away from namecheap

Can you post screenshot ? I dont see renewal table on their website, i only see registration fee which is 1.57$ and if multiple years selected it's 12$ per year.

sec, need one more post

.club renewal should be $12.88.

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/

Says $12.88 to renew .club

no sorry cannot post pic, however its shows up with the usual renewal fee within the namecheap console, but then , when you checkout and want to pay, it gets raised to a whopping 356$ . but only for some premium keywords, not all of the .club extensions.
i noticed support, hope to hear from them soon

It's common for custom TLD to to set custom prices for "premium" domains.

I wouldn't be surprised if some were sneaky enough to offer a "promo" pricing for the initial registration, then fuck you on the renewal fees.

But I hope it's not the case, good luck!

answer from support:

Per our check, the domain names you mentioned are marked as Premium on the Registry level. Premium domains are usually short and/or related to generic keywords that millions of people search for online on a regular basis.

Unlike aftermarket premium domains, which are usually sold by their owners at a higher price but are renewed at a regular price, the Registry premium domains have a higher price for registration, renewal and transfer. I'm afraid, we can't influence the price as it is set directly by the respective Registry for .club domains.

okay dear .club owners, be warned

what wonders me, is that a domain can be marked as premium after the inital registration. id understand if it were marked "premium" before registration
but they renewed me 5 years at standard 12,88 $ and now out of the blue its a premium domain..this appears shady practise to me..however i have my lesson learned

This is why they offered these sort of domains at just a few cents or similar - It was obvious - Sorry...

NameCheap have made a short term gain - I don't think they will win the in long run though.....

They got you on that one

That's bananas. Sorry that happened to you. Hopefully you can find a better registrar to transfer to.

Definitely shady.

However, while I don't like Namecheap, it seems like it's the .club TLD owner that's responsible, not Namecheap.

I'm staying away from all these custom TLDs, they can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

Check out Porkbun, they're way cheaper

It doesn't make a bit difference which registrar you use if it's the TLD owner setting the premium price tag.
Namecheap's cut is probably only a few dollars that they put on top of the reseller price.

Sad but true . . .

After that, I hope you would not be disappointed :error

If it doesn't end with a .com .net or an occasional .org i ain't buying it.

:2 cents:

What actually happened is you bought names in first year on special the savings were shown along with renewal fee when you actually registered them. At time you only took notice of final price which probably was a $9 first year but a $100 a year domain. Lots of people read only the final price and overlooked the savings for the first year it wasn't hidden though. I am assuming your talking about gTLD. Customers overlooked it at loads of registrars and was always disclosed.