Porkbun
The honest-pricing benchmark: one .com price to register, renew and transfer alike, with privacy, DNS and SSL free, but US-hours support and dollar billing.
Who owns it
Porkbun (Porkbun LLC, Tigard, Oregon; a Top Level Design company, founded 2015 by Ray King and Peter Brual; privately held; 4 million domains and about 750,000 customers as of August 2026) is what a registrar looks like when it is built by domain people rather than a hosting sales team. The .com price is flat: $11.08 to register, $11.08 to renew, $11.08 to transfer in, and the site markets "no surprise renewals". The only jumps are on TLDs sold on a first-year sale (.co.uk $4.32 then $5.66; .io $28.12 then $51.80). Everything a small business needs is bundled free: WHOIS privacy on by default, Cloudflare-powered anycast DNS with one-click DNSSEC, Let's Encrypt SSL that auto-renews, 20 email forwards and URL forwarding per domain. Account security is the best in the field (TOTP, WebAuthn hardware keys and passkeys) and it is the only registrar here with a public REST API and an official MCP server (81 tools) for AI agents, plus bulk management and a published price-change table ahead of Verisign's .com rise on 1 November 2026.
What to know
The catches are geography and scale. Porkbun bills in USD with no VAT line, so a UK buyer wears the exchange rate and card fees. Phone and chat run 9am to 5pm Pacific, seven days a week (that is 5pm to 1am in the UK), with email answered in about six hours; there is no UK number. A subset of new accounts is asked for photo ID via Veriff. Trustpilot is 4.9 on 26,873 invited reviews with 2% one-star; the complaints are about 2FA lockouts, a checkout that has led people to buy two TLDs by accident, and the newer hosting and email products rather than domains. Saaskly has no commercial relationship with Porkbun; this placement earns us nothing.
Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, documentation and third-party reviews.
Pros
- +Flat .com pricing with no renewal jump
- +Free privacy, DNS, DNSSEC, SSL and email forwarding
- +Public API plus a first-party MCP server; hardware-key 2FA and passkeys
Cons
- −USD billing with no VAT invoice line
- −Support only 9–5 Pacific (5pm–1am UK), no UK number
- −Trustpilot notes 2FA lockouts and a confusing checkout
Pricing
Minimum commitment: $11.08 ($11.08/yr for the entry licence). The least you can spend before walking away; excludes numbers, minutes and add-ons.
.com renewal
$11.08/yr · annual commitment
Month-to-month: not published
- ✓Registration = renewal = transfer; USD, no VAT line; .co.uk $4.32 then $5.66; .io $28.12 then $51.80; .com rises to about $11.81 on 1 Nov 2026 (registry).
Specifications
| Rating | 4.2 |
| Pricing and plans | |
|---|---|
| .com renewal / yr | $11.08 |
| .com first year | $11.08 |
| Renewal premium* | 0% |
| .co.uk renewal / yr | $5.66 |
| Pricing pattern | Flat |
| .co.uk first year | $4.32 |
| Transfer-out fee | Free |
| TLDs offered | 400 |
| Features | |
| WHOIS privacy | Free |
| Checkout upsells | Light |
| Transfer out | Free, self-serve |
| 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 | ✓ |
| Integrations and developers | |
| API | ✓ |
| MCP server | ✓ |
| Ownership and trust | |
| 2FA | ✓ |
| Trustpilot (reviews)† | 4.9 (26,873) |
| Support | |
| UK phone support | No |
| 24/7 live chat | No |
| Support channels | Phone (US toll-free, 9–5 PT, 7 days), Live chat (9–5 PT), Email 24/7 |
*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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