Porkbun

Porkbun charges $11.08/yr for a .com — to register, to renew, and to transfer in (transfers include a year's extension), per its published pricing in July 2026 and unchanged when we re-read it in October 2026. WHOIS privacy is free ('your privacy shouldn't come at a price', as their pricing page puts it), SSL certificates are free, and the dashboard has an API and no upsell circus.

The company: Porkbun is the registrar brand of Top Level Design, an Oregon company that sold its registry businesses in 2021 and 2023 to run the registrar full-time. ICANN-accredited, launched 2015, 500+ TLDs, and — by its own August 2026 figures — more than four million domains for about 750,000 customers; it also sells hosting and $3/mo email mailboxes, which we do not rate here. Support, per the contact page read in October 2026: phone at 1.855.PORKBUN (1.855.767.5286) and live chat, both staffed 9 AM to 5 PM Pacific every day including weekends and holidays, with a dial-9 callback when the queue is full; email at support@porkbun.com 24/7/365 at a quoted average response of about six hours. Live chat has run since January 2019.

The renewal delta is the whole story in domains, and Porkbun's is 1.0× — the register price is the renew price. Compare the September 2026 field from our tracker: Namecheap renews .com around $14.78 after an ~$10.98 first year (about 1.35×), and Gandi renews at $38.38 after an $11 first year (3.5×). Over five years, one .com at Porkbun runs about $55.40; the same domain at Gandi's published rates runs about $164.50. Registrar choice is a renewal decision.

Renewal figures come from our Hosting Renewal Price Index — intro vs renewal pricing for every provider we cover, verified on vendor sites and dated.

Choose Porkbun if

• +Anyone consolidating domains who wants flat, predictable renewals
• +Developers — the API and DNS tooling are first-class for a budget registrar
• +Buyers allergic to checkout upsells

Look elsewhere if

• −You need phone or chat outside 9 AM–5 PM Pacific — both are staffed every day including weekends and holidays, but overnight the only channel is email
• −Your TLD is exotic — the catalog is broad but not exhaustive; check first
• −Corporate procurement demands a household-name vendor

Transfers in cost the same $11.08 (which includes the added year), making consolidation cheap. Transfers out follow standard ICANN process — unlock, get the auth code, go. DNS migrates like any registrar: recreate records before switching nameservers, or use Porkbun's DNS import.

Porkbun is a smaller company than Namecheap or GoDaddy, which for some buyers is a governance concern rather than a product one. Support is fuller than most budget registrars — a human-answered US phone line, live chat and email, with phone and chat staffed 9 AM to 5 PM Pacific 365 days a year — but there is no overnight phone or chat, so a 24/7 operation should plan on email (Porkbun quotes an average response of about six hours) for an outage at 2 AM. Some ccTLDs and premium categories price differently than the flagship .com rate — the flat-renewal pattern holds per-TLD, but not every TLD is $11.

Correction, 15 October 2026: earlier versions of this profile said Porkbun does not offer phone support and told phone-first buyers to look elsewhere. That was wrong. Porkbun's COO wrote to us, we checked the contact page, the knowledge base and the company's blog, and the phone line has existed for years. The cons, the look-elsewhere list and this section were rewritten the same day; nothing else in the profile changed.

Alternatives to consider

• NetArt — loaded plans with a published sla
• IONOS — lowest first-year cost — if you plan the exit

Deeper comparisons

• Domain Renewal Prices: Where a .com Stays Cheap
• Porkbun vs Cloudflare Registrar
• Cheap Domain Registrars: 9 Compared on the Price You Keep Paying
• Best GoDaddy Alternatives
• GoDaddy Renewal Prices, Explained
• Spaceship Review: The Cheap-Renewal Registrar, Verified