Tucows Wholesale Domain Names Just Got Cheaper

What Does Tucows Do?

Since I work at Tucows, I get asked this question a lot: What does Tucows do?

Here’s the short answer, which should do for the purposes of this article: Tucows is in the business of providing wholesale services to ISPs and hosting services, such as domain name registration and email. The ISPs and hosting services then provide these services to their customers. By buying our wholesale services rather than implementing and maintaining these services themselves, they can concentrate on customer service.

Tucows’ Domain Prices: Lower and More Transparent

The announcement on the Tucows Blog puts it so well that I’ll just quote it:

How’s this for a radical idea: Charge less for each domain, then add more services and features and then fully explain where every penny of each transaction goes. It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what we’re doing starting today.

For example, our price of a .com domain used to be US$10.05, and now it’s dropped to US$9.20. Here’s how it breaks down:

Item	Cost
.com registration (charged by the registry)	US$6.00
ICANN fee	US$0.20
Tucows management fee	US$3.00

In pie chart form, the cost breakdown looks like this:

Here’s what the Tucows management fee covers:

• Free Name Suggestion Tool powered by DomainsBot
• 50% of net domain parking revenue
• The ability to sell any of hundreds of thousands of premium domain names
• Access to a library of APIs and web-based tools for provisioning and management of domains
• Technical support

And come September, these will also become available with every domain name:

• Free WHOIS Privacy
• Free Managed DNS

For more details, see our news release and our blog article.