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Namecheap pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Namecheap (namecheap.com) is a domain, DNS or SSL provider. Yearly per-domain registration and renewal fees, with renewals costing well above promotional first-year prices; DNS is free through FreeDNS, while PremiumDNS and SSL certificates are paid add-ons.. Free plan: FreeDNS: no-cost DNS hosting that also works for domains registered with other registrars (up to 800 records per domain)..

What Namecheap costs

  • 1 .com domain: $1.56/mo (($18.48 list renewal without coupon + $0.20 mandatory ICANN fee) / 12 = $1.5567, shown as $1.56. WHOIS privacy is free forever per the aggregator. The $14.78 renewal requires coupon COUPONFCNC, so it is excluded.)
  • DNS, 5 domains: free (FreeDNS is no-cost, and Namecheap's KB says domains registered with other companies qualify. It allows 800 records per domain (well above the 50 per zone needed), lists A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT and CAA, and states no query or zone cap, so 0. If FreeDNS were not eligible, PremiumDNS at its 2020 list price of $4.88 per domain x 5 / 12 = $2.03/mo would apply.)
  • 1 SSL certificate: $0.92/mo (PositiveSSL, now SSL.com Standard SSL: one-domain DV, 1-year listed at $11.00/yr, so $11.00 / 12 = $0.9167, shown as $0.92. No renewal price was found, and the SALE label suggests a promo, so this may understate the standard rate.)

Plan compared: One .com domain at list renewal ($18.48/yr plus $0.20 ICANN fee; WHOIS privacy free), divided by 12.. Prices are USD per month: the headline is one .com domain at its yearly renewal price (not the first-year promo), with contact privacy and any required account plan, divided by 12. We also price managed DNS for 5 domains registered elsewhere at 5 million queries a month and one single-domain SSL certificate for a year divided by 12; a product that does not do a job shows no price for it.

What Namecheap does

Core: Domain registration, Free WHOIS privacy, Email on your domain (partly), Many sites per plan.

Important: Broad TLD coverage, DNS hosting (partly), Hosting & email bundles, Aliases, groups and domains (partly), Standard protocol access (partly), Automated site backups (partly), 24/7 expert support (partly).

Also has: Transparent renewal pricing (partly), Bulk portfolio management (partly), Domain security locks (partly), Anycast DNS with SLA (partly), DNSSEC (partly), API & infrastructure as code (partly), Free automated SSL (partly), OV & EV certificates, Wildcard & multi-domain certs, Certificate lifecycle management (partly), URL & email forwarding (partly), Aftermarket & auctions (partly), Team access & roles (partly), Team calendar and contacts (partly), Cloud drive & sync (partly), Native mobile apps (partly), Admin controls and SSO (partly), App marketplace and APIs (partly), WordPress management (partly), No-code website builder (partly), Non-WordPress sites & apps (partly), VPS & cloud upgrades (partly), Agency & reseller tools (partly), Application performance tracing (partly).

Namecheap price hikes

Cheaper alternatives to Namecheap

At 1 .com domain at renewal, Namecheap costs $1.56/mo. 2 domain, DNS or SSL providers cost less:

  • Cloudflare Registrar: $0.87/mo (Standard .com renewal at Cloudflare's at-cost price of $10.46/yr (tracker figure), with WHOIS redaction free.), covers 84% of Namecheap; missing or partial: Hosting & email bundles (partly), Bulk portfolio management, OV & EV certificates, Aftermarket & auctions
  • Amazon Route 53: $1.33/mo (Pay-as-you-go .com standard renewal ($16 a year)), covers 70% of Namecheap; missing or partial: Free WHOIS privacy (partly), Hosting & email bundles, Bulk portfolio management, OV & EV certificates, URL & email forwarding

Namecheap alternatives: 4 domain, DNS or SSL providers compared, at every size.

Other kinds of products that cover part of Namecheap

  • Vercel (Hosting): covers 72% of Namecheap; missing or partial: Free WHOIS privacy (partly), Hosting & email bundles (partly), Bulk portfolio management, DNSSEC, OV & EV certificates
  • Hostinger (Web & WordPress hosting): covers 66% of Namecheap; missing or partial: Free WHOIS privacy (partly), Bulk portfolio management, Anycast DNS with SLA, DNSSEC, OV & EV certificates

Every change we logged

  • Jul 11, 2026 · Repriced: From July 11, 2026, certificates are issued by SSL.com instead of Sectigo, and PositiveSSL is renamed Standard SSL with the same validation levels. The Namecheap KB gives no USD prices for the change.
  • Sep 1, 2023 · Price increase: Namecheap raised the standard .com renewal price by about 9%, to $15.88 a year, effective September 1, 2023, and attributed the change to Verisign. The 'before' figure is implied from that 9% rise, not stated.
  • Nov 2021 · Price increase: Namecheap announced price increases for .com registrations and renewals, plus shared hosting, SSL certificates, private email and EasyWP, taking effect over the following weeks. The article gives no before or after figures.

Sources

Pricing page: namecheap.com/domains. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Namecheap's own pages returned HTTP 403 to the fetch tool, so the .com renewal rests on the domainoffer.net snapshot dated Oct 17, 2026, and the DNS and SSL points rest on Namecheap knowledge-base pages, search snippets and a 2020 PremiumDNS page. No sourced change explains the step from $15.88 (2023) to $18.48 (2026), and PricingSaaS has no slug for this product, so it was not checked.