There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each zone and then for the DNS queries.

The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.

The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).

Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.

To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.

With our new plans we offer zones for $2 per month for unlimited query volume whereas Amazon charges $0.50 for each zone, plus $0.40 for the first million queries + $0.20 for each million queries thereafter. We will likely also eventually have to charge by query volume because there are real costs with operating our DNS network. One of the reasons we have not yet talked about what we will do with existing plans is because we do not know for sure what the optimal pricing will be with query volumes involved.

Cloudflare is something altogether different and frankly is hard to compete with based on price as they are subsidising their free tier with by charging business customers at a much higher amount (I can say this from experience).

In terms of where we are headed to differentiate ourselves from other domain management services, the new features we've been launching should make that clear. For example, you can now manage Route 53 zones from within DNSimple (https://blog.dnsimple.com/2023/06/manage-aws-routes-in-dnsim...) as well as CoreDNS zones for on-premise DNS, as well as see your GoDaddy domains in DNSimple as well (with management coming in the upcoming months).

For any existing customer that wants to switch to the new plan, we've made that easy to do (for example if you have one zone it'll be cheaper in the Solo plan). For customers that resubscribe and need to select a new plan, they are always welcome to reach out to us at support at dnsimple dot com and we will be happy to work with them to find a solution that works for them.

Our goal with the DNS zone pricing is to bring it in line with what folks are paying for similar service at the major cloud providers. When it comes to authoritative DNS, our operational environment has changed for us in the last couple of years, and what was once a reasonable fixed price is no longer. We're paying for DDoS defense by query volume, and as such we need to move towards a pricing model that covers that. By making the pricing the same across all of our plans, we can also focus on making our DNS better for everyone, not just for our higher tier plans.

Hopefully this helps clarify a bit on why we are introducing new plans. We still have a few more changes to make before the year is out, which is one of the reasons why we have not introduced any timeline for phasing out our old plans, allowing customers who are on them to continue with their current pricing for the time being.

Feel free to reach out to support at dnsimple dot com if you have any other questions, we're happy to answer.

DNSimple was founded as a fully remote company in 2010 with the goal of making DNS and domain management simple for everyone. We offer a customer friendly user interface, a simple to use API, and operate critical infrastructure for our customers to provide reliable, trustworthy services. Our team continuously innovates, enhances, and releases new features for our customers to make their domain management effortless.

Open positions:

Software Engineer in Feature Engineering (https://apply.workable.com/dnsimple/j/36AE622A87/) Develop and release customer-facing features. Senior Software Engineer in Registrar Operations (https://apply.workable.com/dnsimple/j/F17DAD5B37/) Help us to improve how our customers manage domains. Software Engineer in Application Operations (https://apply.workable.com/dnsimple/j/510AFA1359/): Continuously enhance and maintain DNSimple's applications to fulfill short-term and long-term needs.

FWIW, DNSimple was blocked by an entire country because we adhere to our local laws in the US and we didn't take down a site that was illegal in their country. This is the Internet we have today.

FWIW, the site is hosted on Cloudfront using an Amazon issued certificate. Here's some debug output I show using curl which shows successful negotiation:

  *   Trying 13.227.219.41...
  * TCP_NODELAY set
  * Connected to howhttps.works (13.227.219.41) port 443 (#0)
  * ALPN, offering h2
  * ALPN, offering http/1.1
  * successfully set certificate verify locations:
  *   CAfile: /etc/ssl/cert.pem
    CApath: none
  * TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
  * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
  * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
  * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
  * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
  * TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
  * TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Change cipher spec (1):
  * TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
  * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS change cipher, Change cipher spec (1):
  * TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
  * SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
  * ALPN, server accepted to use h2
  * Server certificate:
  *  subject: CN=howhttps.works
  *  start date: Feb 14 00:00:00 2020 GMT
  *  expire date: Mar 14 12:00:00 2021 GMT
  *  subjectAltName: host "howhttps.works" matched cert's "howhttps.works"
  *  issuer: C=US; O=Amazon; OU=Server CA 1B; CN=Amazon
  *  SSL certificate verify ok.