Domains

A domain is the name everything else hangs on: the site, the API, the email addresses, the links inside an app. Cole buys domains at Cloudflare’s registrar, which sells them at cost, and runs every one of them as a zone on Cloudflare DNS. A .com costs $10.46 per year (as of Oct 28, 2026, domains.cloudflare.com), and most of the common endings cost about the same.

How domain pricing works

Three parties set the price of a domain:

• The registry runs the top-level domain (TLD), keeps the master list of names under it, and sets the wholesale price. Verisign runs .com; country-code TLDs such as .ai, .io and .uk are run for their countries and set their own rules.
• The registrar sells the name to you and renews it every year. Most registrars add a markup, and many discount the first year and make it back on renewals.
• ICANN adds a small fee to generic TLDs such as .com and .org.

Cloudflare’s registrar charges exactly what the registry and ICANN charge it, with no markup, so the price you see is the renewal price too. When a first year is cheaper there, as it is for several TLDs this month, the discount comes from the registry itself. Names the registry classes as premium (short words, common terms) are priced one by one and can cost far more, and names bought from another owner on the aftermarket cost whatever the seller asks.

What the common endings cost

Cloudflare’s at-cost prices on its own domain search, as of October 28, 2026:

TLD	Price	Notes
.com	$10.46 per year	The default. The same price every year.
.org	$11.20 per year ($8.50 the first year)	Nonprofits, communities, open-source projects
.xyz	$11.20 per year ($12.30 the first year)	Short names are still easy to find
.dev	$12.20 per year ($8.20 the first year)	HTTPS only: browsers refuse to load it over plain HTTP
.app	$14.20 per year ($8.20 the first year)	HTTPS only, like .dev
.io	$50 per year ($32 the first year)	A favorite of developer tools, and priced like it
.ai	$80 per year, 2-year minimum ($160 up front)	Anguilla’s country code; the registry requires two years at a time

Compare renewal prices, not first-year prices. A cheap first year is a discount; the renewal is what the name costs for as long as you keep it.

Which one to buy

• .com is the gold standard. People type it by default, autocomplete suggests it, and an email address at a .com looks normal to everyone. If the .com of your name is available at the standard price, buy it.
• Match the ending to the audience when the .com is gone. .ai says “AI product” before anyone reads a word; .dev and .app suit developer tools and apps, and come with HTTPS enforced; .org suits a community or a nonprofit; a country code suits a local business.
• Short and spellable beats clever. If you have to spell it out loud, it will be mistyped.
• Buy the obvious neighbors of a name that matters, such as the .com of your .ai, and redirect them with one rule on a proxied record.
• A name for a side project can be anything. Cole’s own collection is a couple of .ai names for AI products, a handful of .coms, and a tail of novelty endings for side projects and jokes, nearly all of them on Cloudflare’s free plan.

Checking Cole’s numbers

Cole said a domain “could be anywhere from $5 to $50 probably really generally… Really $5 to $30 most commonly.” At Cloudflare’s at-cost prices that holds. The cheapest common name in the search was a .uk at about five dollars, .com is $10.46 per year (as of Oct 28, 2026, domains.cloudflare.com), most of the other common endings sit close to it, and .io’s renewal, $50 per year ($32 the first year) (as of Oct 28, 2026, domains.cloudflare.com), is the top of the everyday range.

On .ai, Cole said: “I think it’s $100 a year maybe and you have to do 2 years.” The two years are right: the registry requires a two-year minimum, Cloudflare’s search shows “.ai … 2-year minimum” with the note that the registry requires it, and Dynadot’s help center says renewals need two years as well. The price is lower than the guess, at least at cost: $80 per year, 2-year minimum ($160 up front) (as of Oct 28, 2026, domains.cloudflare.com). Registrars that add a markup charge more, so a guess near a hundred a year is fair for most of them.

Buying and moving domains at Cloudflare

• Search at domains.cloudflare.com; buying needs a Cloudflare account.
• Nameservers are Cloudflare’s. A domain registered with Cloudflare must use Cloudflare’s nameservers. To point it somewhere else, you would have to move the registration to another registrar first. (For Cole’s setup that is the point: every domain’s DNS lives at Cloudflare anyway.)
• Privacy and safety are included. WHOIS redaction is free, DNSSEC is one click, and domains are locked against transfer by default.
• Transferring a domain in takes about half an hour of work and up to ten days. The domain has to be active on Cloudflare DNS first, most transfers add a year to the registration, and ICANN blocks a transfer within 60 days of a registration, a previous transfer or a change to the registrant contact.
• Verify the registrant email. ICANN requires it; an unverified address puts the domain on hold.

Domains in Cole’s setup

A new domain gets the same treatment every time:

1. Register it at Cloudflare, or transfer it there.
2. Add the zone to the OpenTofu code, usually to the shared root for small zones.
3. If it receives mail, turn on Email Routing; if it sends none, publish the no-mail records (MX 0 ., v=spf1 -all, a DMARC reject policy), so nobody can send mail as it.
4. Point it at whatever serves it: a DNS-only record for a frontend on Vercel, or a proxied record through a tunnel for a service on one of the Servers (see The Cloudflare Front Door).
5. Turn on DNSSEC only together with the DS record at the registrar, and never turn it off while the DS record is still published, or the zone stops resolving.

The yearly renewals are on What It Costs, next to everything else.