I've been using Pair Domains (née pairNIC) as my default domain registrar for 20+ years. It dates back to my using Pair Networks for website hosting (since 1998, and mscape.com still lives there) - this is a spin-off service. The admin UI is not the fanciest, but it has the control that I need, and the (human) support has always been great.

I recently got a renewal notice for a .com domain, and was a bit surprised at the price – $116.35 for 5 years. My mental model is that it should be closer to $10/year. Pair has changed hands a couple of times in the past few years, first sold to Libsyn in 2018 and then to the more mysterious Your.Online in 2024. The latter is effectively a private equity roll-up, and I was curious if the high prices were due to them. Between the Wayback Machine and my email receipts I was able to put together this historical pricing table:

It looks like Libsyn started this trend, but the new owners leaned into it even more. The increased divergence between registration and renewal feels like an attempt to rely on laziness/intertia. The renewal price I was quoted was slightly less than the above pricing table ($23.27 vs. $24.49) so perhaps there was some attempt at frog boiling for long-timer customers. But in this case I had already been using Cloudflare's registrar for new projects, so I bit the bullet and did the hour or so of ClickOps to get everything switched over. Not the most satisfying way to spend a weekend afternoon, but hopefully this post can be a PSA for anyone else that has been similarly stuck.