Porkbun
The honest-pricing benchmark: .com costs $11.08 to register, renew and transfer alike, WHOIS privacy, DNS, SSL and email forwarding are all free, there is a public API and the only first-party MCP server in the category, but support is US-hours only and you pay in dollars.
How we testPorkbun (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.
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. Porkbun's affiliate programme is discontinued, so this placement earns Saaskly 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 |
| .com renewal / yr | $11.08 |
| .com first year | $11.08 |
| Renewal premium* | 0% |
| .co.uk renewal / yr | $5.66 |
| WHOIS privacy | Free |
| Pricing pattern | Flat |
| Checkout upsells | Light |
| Transfer out | Free, self-serve |
| Bring your own DNS | ✓ |
| DNSSEC | ✓ |
| 2FA | ✓ |
| API | ✓ |
| MCP server | ✓ |
| UK phone support | No |
| Blocks AI agents by default** | No |
| Trustpilot (reviews)† | 4.9 (26,873) |
| .co.uk first year | $4.32 |
| Transfer-out fee | Free |
| TLDs offered | 400 |
| Free DNS hosting | ✓ |
| Transfer lock by default | ✓ |
| Free email forwarding | ✓ |
| Free SSL with domain | ✓ |
| 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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