A startup entrepreneur and good friend of mine sent me an email asking if the GoDaddy Domain Discount Club was worthwhile to purchase or if it was a waste of money.
He wrote:
“Is the GoDaddy Discount Domain Club worthwhile if I have about 75 various domains to renew? I did it last year but think I had a coupon. It’s about $120/yr and I think it makes sense but it’s confusing to me with all the options. I don’t need the auctions or other features, just discounts on renewals and new domain registrations. What are your thoughts?”
GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club is like a Costco membership — you pay a yearly fee upfront and then you get access to discounted products.
In GoDaddy’s case, you pay $119.88 per year and you can register and renew domain names for between 20 and 60 percent off their standard retail pricing.
GoDaddy promotes the Domain Discount Club as $9.99 per month but you have to buy it for 12 months, so it’s really $119.88 per year. Don’t be confused like I was.
Now — for simplicity let’s assume my friend’s 75 domain names were all .com. GoDaddy charges $14.99 for regular retail renewals, and discounts them to $8.29 in the Domain Discount Club.
But wait a moment, you also have to pay 18 cents per domain name for an ICANN fee, and then sales tax.
So if my friend was NOT in GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club, he would pay $15.17 per .com domain name (which is the $14.99 price plus the 18 cent ICANN fee) multiplied by 75 domain names, multiplied by 1.084 (for 8.4% Washington State sales tax), which equals $1,233.32 in renewal costs per year.
But — if my friend joined GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club, he would pay $8.47 per .com domain name (which is the $8.29 price plus the 18 cent ICANN fee), multiplied by 75 domain names, multiplied by 1.084 (again, for 8.4% Washington State sales tax), plus the $119.88 GoDaddy Domain Discount Club annual fee, which equals $818.56 in renewal costs per year.
You can see my friend would save $414.76 per year being in GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club with his 75 domain name renewals.
Now, for those of us in the industry we know that you can go hunting on discussion forums like NamePros.com or coupon sites like RetailMeNot.com to find domain name registration or renewal discount coupon codes that will likely work for one or two domain names.
But we also know that we’ll waste time searching for a coupon, trying and failing over and over again, and — at the end of the day — time is money and most of us don’t have the time to find valid discounts coupons.
So if you’re running a business, you prefer GoDaddy as your registrar, you don’t have time to waste, and you renew more than 18 domain names a year, I suggest you consider GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club.
I’ve created the GoDaddy Domain Discount Club Breakeven Calculator that you can use with some of the major top-level domains like .com, .net and .org, as well as a catch-all .other top-level domain box for all your other domain names. It’s free to use.
Play with the calculator and let me know what you think in the comments below.
If you would like to be able to see the pricing of the various TLDs with and without Domain Discount Club, please let me know in the comments and I’ll consider upgrading the calculator interface in the future.
And, if you use coupon code CJCRMN35 you can get 20% off the cost of your GoDaddy Domain Discount Club annual price.
If I find a better coupon, I’ll post it below the video. If you find a coupon’s not working or you have a better Domain Discount Club coupon, post a comment and let me know.
But please, I don’t want ANY coupon codes for GoDaddy, just valid ones for GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club. So any other coupon comments will be marked as spam and deleted.
Finally, I have no affiliation with GoDaddy other than having some of my domain names registered with them. I’m not compensated for the coupon code listed on this page, nor for creating this Domain Discount Club breakeven calculator.
I hope this calculator and lesson has been helpful to you in your domain name activities.
If you want to learn a methodology, master a set of tools, and think more analytically on your journey to become a more profitable domain name investor, consider signing up for DNAcademy.
I hope you found benefit from this story and the domain name breakeven calculator. Thank you so much for being a part of my journey.
Michael Cyger is the founder and lead instructor of DNAcademy.
Ex-nuclear, @GE, @Citi & @NASAJPL engineer; entrepreneur; undercover coder; founder & award-winning publisher: @iSixSigma @BainbridgeIsl @DNAcademy.
Like this article? There’s more like it on the blog at www.dnacademy.com/blog.
