> why can't I pay $100 today and get some kind of proof of ownership for life?
Because Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is everything in this business, and the registries (Verisign etc) are monopolies for a given TLD.
The registrar's minimum cost to hold annual registration on a .com domain is a bit higher than $9.15 ($8.97 to Verisign registry, $0.18 plus accreditation and variable fees to ICANN).
The rest of your registration fee is revenue to the registrar (minus payment processing fees, and plus any upsells).
Registrar pricing is all over the place. GoDaddy used to be low-cost, high upsell. Now they are on the high end of normal pricing (and still high upsell! Don't use GoDaddy!).
NOTE: Cloudflare apparently absorbs the accreditation and variable ICANN fees without passing them on to the customer. These fees total ~$20-45K/yr depending on domain volume -- assume the maximum for Cloudflare. So they are losing a very small amount of money with every domain they register. Loss leader, etc, I'm sure it's a smart marketing write off for them.
Because Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is everything in this business, and the registries (Verisign etc) are monopolies for a given TLD.
The registrar's minimum cost to hold annual registration on a .com domain is a bit higher than $9.15 ($8.97 to Verisign registry, $0.18 plus accreditation and variable fees to ICANN).
The rest of your registration fee is revenue to the registrar (minus payment processing fees, and plus any upsells).
Registrar pricing is all over the place. GoDaddy used to be low-cost, high upsell. Now they are on the high end of normal pricing (and still high upsell! Don't use GoDaddy!).
A quick survey of .com annual renewal prices:
NOTE: Cloudflare apparently absorbs the accreditation and variable ICANN fees without passing them on to the customer. These fees total ~$20-45K/yr depending on domain volume -- assume the maximum for Cloudflare. So they are losing a very small amount of money with every domain they register. Loss leader, etc, I'm sure it's a smart marketing write off for them.https://domainnamewire.com/2022/02/10/verisign-announces-ano...
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-fees-2018-08...