GoDaddy’s acquisition of Uniregistry in 2020 was followed by a change in the now defunct platform’s fees.
Raising the fee from 10% to 15% was only the beginning; the eventual acquisition of Dan.com in 2022 was also followed by a raise in fees to 15%. What GoDaddy gave back in exchange, was the lowering of its Afternic and network fees from 20% to 15%.
But that equalization of fees across all GoDaddy marketplaces was accompanied by a sneaky clause, raising its fees to a whopping 25% when a domain was sold but wasn’t using an approved nameserver pair.
This trickery caused some domain investors to get hit with 25% in sales fees just because they had listed, for example, their domains at Afternic but were using their own landing pages to capture traffic, process leads, and send these leads to their Afternic listings. They believed GoDaddy was part of a free market where the consumer has a choice.
Instead, the 25% charges that GoDaddy/Afternic/Dan impose to such transactions is a representation of a market where competition is suppressed and where choices are punished—and yet, GoDaddy had the audacity to justify this fee as the supposed “true value” of Afternic, calling the 15% rate a “discount.”
We call it GoDaddyNomics.
Even today, some domain investors believe they are safe to use standard GoDaddy DNS servers meant for hosting. Some have claimed that by using the standard hosting DNS of ns1.godaddy.com and ns2.godaddy.com one can then tweak the A records and point an Afternic-listed domain to their own landing page, securing a potential sale at 15% while capturing all traffic privately from GoDaddy.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
The only list of GoDaddy-approved DNS that won’t lead to a sale with a whopping 25% head tax includes only the following nameservers:
- afternic.com
- smartname.com
- uniregistrymarket.link
- dan.com
- undeveloped.com
- internettraffic.com
- cashparking.com
Effectively, as Uniregistry is obsolete, the list is even shorter:
- afternic.com
- smartname.com
- dan.com
- undeveloped.com
- cashparking.com
Keep this in mind when you attempt to fool GoDaddy and short-change the biggest domain registrar in the world, depriving them of their honest cut from the domain sales pie.
