Per-Domain Pricing Is a Scam
Why monitoring tools charge per domain, and why flat-rate pricing makes more sense for growing businesses.
You find a domain monitoring tool. Looks good. Reasonable price. Then you add your domains.
3 domains? Fine.
10 domains? Getting expensive.
50 domains? You're now paying more than enterprise software.
Per-domain pricing punishes you for success. Here's why it exists, and why we don't do it.
Why Tools Charge Per Domain
The honest reasons:
Server costs scale with usage. More domains means more checks, more storage, more bandwidth. Fair enough.
It's how the industry works. Everyone else charges this way, so customers expect it.
The less honest reasons:
It extracts maximum value. Agencies and portfolio owners have lots of domains. They'll pay because they have to.
It creates artificial tiers. "Starter: 5 domains. Pro: 25 domains. Enterprise: Contact us." Each tier is a pricing negotiation disguised as a feature.
It discourages comprehensive monitoring. You have 100 domains but only monitor 25 because that's what your plan allows. The tool knows this. They're fine with it.
The hidden cost
Per-domain pricing makes you choose which domains to monitor. The one you skip is the one that expires.
The Math Gets Ugly Fast
Let's say a tool charges $0.50 per domain per month. Sounds cheap.
| Domains | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | $5 | $60 |
| 50 | $25 | $300 |
| 100 | $50 | $600 |
| 500 | $250 | $3,000 |
At 500 domains — not unusual for an agency or domain investor — you're paying $3,000/year to check expiry dates. That's more than many businesses spend on their entire hosting.
And that's just domain monitoring. Add SSL monitoring at another $0.30/domain. Uptime at $1/endpoint. The costs compound.
Who Gets Hurt
Agencies. You manage 200 client domains. Per-domain pricing either eats your margins or gets passed to clients who don't understand why "checking a date" costs money.
Domain investors. A portfolio of 1,000 domains is modest in this world. Per-domain pricing makes monitoring economically irrational — so you don't, and domains slip through.
Growing startups. You start with 5 domains, hit a pricing tier, and now monitoring costs more than your database. You either pay up or stop monitoring the "less important" ones.
Anyone doing it right. You should monitor all your domains. Pricing models that punish comprehensive monitoring are broken.
Flat-Rate Is Better
Here's how we think about it:
The cost to monitor 10 domains vs 100 domains is not 10x. It's marginal. A few more DNS lookups. A few more rows in a database. The infrastructure scales; the price shouldn't scale linearly with it.
One price, unlimited domains
Monitor everything. Don't play the "which domains are worth monitoring" game.
Predictable costs
Your bill doesn't surprise you when you add a new project or client.
Aligned incentives
We want you to monitor more, not less. Comprehensive monitoring means fewer disasters, happier customers, better word of mouth.
The Objection
"But heavy users subsidize light users!"
Maybe. A user with 1,000 domains costs more to serve than one with 10. But:
- Heavy users are also the most likely to stick around and recommend the product.
- Light users often become heavy users. Price them out early and you lose them forever.
- The marginal cost difference is smaller than you think. It's not 100x cost for 100x domains.
We'd rather have pricing that makes sense for everyone than pricing optimized for extraction.
Flat-rate monitoring for all your domains
Domain Expiry Watcher: $9/month, unlimited domains. Infrastructure Suite: $19/month, includes SSL and uptime too.
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