Gandi
The French registrar of the 2000s is now the most expensive .com renewal in this comparison, though still a strong engineering product with a full API and free DNS.
Who owns it
Gandi (Gandi SAS, Paris; IANA registrar 81; founded 2000 by Valentin Lacambre, Laurent Chemla and others; merged into Your.Online with Total Webhosting Solutions in February 2023, itself part of the Strikwerda-backed Your.World group with 35 brands and more than €300 million of revenue) was for twenty years the registrar developers recommended to each other: 800 TLDs, a real API, no advertising, profits reinvested. The engineering is still there: a documented v5 API with personal access tokens (ACME automation added September 2026), free LiveDNS anycast with one-click DNSSEC, unlimited free email aliases, TOTP or U2F multi-factor authentication that is now mandatory, and, unusually, auto-renew switched off by default so nothing renews without your say-so.
What it costs
The pricing is what changed. Shown to a UK visitor in GBP with taxes included and an ex-VAT toggle: .com £10.80 in year one (£9.00 ex VAT) then £38.38 to renew (£31.98 ex VAT), a 255% premium and the highest .com renewal here; .co.uk £5.99 then £19.18 (£4.99 and £15.98 ex VAT); .io £29.99 then £59.99. Free mailboxes ended in November 2023 and renewals rose in 2023 and again in 2024. Hacker News threads titled "increases rates by up to 1000%" and ".com renewal price is up 60%" record customers leaving for Porkbun and Cloudflare. Trustpilot is 4.6 on 3,879 invited reviews, but the 2026 one-star reviews are almost entirely about price rises and support hours: chat reported open only a few hours a day, tickets unanswered for two weeks, no retail phone line (phone advice is a paid contract). Unlocking a domain to transfer it out can take up to 72 hours unless your account uses TOTP. A 16.5-hour outage on 9 March 2025 got a full postmortem.
Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, documentation and third-party reviews.
Pros
- +Full public API with token auth, free LiveDNS with one-click DNSSEC, unlimited email forwarding
- +Mandatory MFA and auto-renew off by default
- +800 TLDs and free .co.uk transfers in
Cons
- −.com renewal £31.98 ex VAT is a 255% jump and the highest in the field
- −Repeated price rises since the 2023 takeover
- −Narrow support hours, no retail phone, and a 72-hour unlock delay unless you use TOTP
Pricing
Minimum commitment: £31.98 (£31.98/yr for the entry licence). The least you can spend before walking away; excludes numbers, minutes and add-ons.
.com renewal
£31.98/yr · annual commitment
Month-to-month: not published
- ✓GBP ex VAT (Gandi displays inc VAT: £38.38; £34.54 inc for 2–9 year renewals); first year £9.00 ex (£10.80 inc); .co.uk £4.99 then £15.98 ex; .io £29.99 then £59.99 inc.
Specifications
| Rating | 3.0 |
| Pricing and plans | |
|---|---|
| .com renewal / yr | £31.98 |
| .com first year | £9 |
| Renewal premium* | 255% |
| .co.uk renewal / yr | £15.98 |
| Pricing pattern | Intro discount |
| .co.uk first year | £4.99 |
| Transfer-out fee | Free |
| TLDs offered | 800 |
| Features | |
| WHOIS privacy | Free |
| Checkout upsells | Light |
| Transfer out | Restricted |
| Bring your own DNS | ✓ |
| DNSSEC | ✓ |
| Blocks AI agents by default** | No |
| Free DNS hosting | ✓ |
| Transfer lock by default | ✓ |
| Free email forwarding | ✓ |
| Free SSL with domain | No |
| Integrations and developers | |
| API | ✓ |
| MCP server | No |
| Ownership and trust | |
| 2FA | ✓ |
| Trustpilot (reviews)† | 4.6 (3,879) |
| Support | |
| UK phone support | No |
| 24/7 live chat | No |
| Support channels | Chat (virtual assistant, then an agent), Ticket, Paid phone advisory contract |
*Renewal premium: how much more the second year of a .com costs than the first, as a percentage of the first-year price. Registrars advertise the first year; you pay the renewal every year after. 0% means the advertised price is the real price. Prices are per domain per year as shown to a UK visitor on the research date, in the currency the registrar bills UK customers in; see each profile for the VAT basis.
**Blocks AI agents by default: whether the registrar's bundled DNS/CDN stops AI agents (chat fetchers, browser-use agents) reaching customer sites unless the owner changes a setting. Recorded only where the vendor documents such a default (Cloudflare, from 15 September 2026, on pages that carry ads).
†Trustpilot: uk.trustpilot.com TrustScore and review count on the research date. Two profiles are not representative of the registrar and are shown for completeness: Cloudflare (1.4) is mostly non-customers blocked by CAPTCHAs on other companies' websites, and Hover (1.3) is 120 unprompted reviews the company has not answered.
Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by Tim Meredith. How we use AI
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