Nobody shops for a registrar twice. You pick one when you register your first domain, you pay whatever the invoice says every year after that, and you never look again. That is exactly what the pricing is built around.
We looked, finally, after a hunch that would not go away. Twelve domains at Versio, a Dutch registrar we had been with since 2017, and a yearly invoice that had quietly grown into something we could not explain. The list price we were paying was €25.99 for a .nl, €36.99 for a .com and €38.99 for a .eu, all excluding VAT. Market rate for those three sits somewhere around €5, €13 and €7.
So we moved all twelve to mijn.host. The yearly bill went from €379.88 to €101.88. Same domains, same expiry dates, roughly one afternoon of work. This is what we learned, and why almost none of it appears in the English-language comparisons that rank for this question.
Why is renewing a .nl or .eu domain so expensive?
Because the number you compared when you signed up was never the number you would keep paying. Registrars sell the first year at or below cost, sometimes at €0.49 or a dollar, and set the renewal at whatever the market will bear. The first year is marketing. Year two onward is the actual product.
That much you can read anywhere. Every comparison article opens with it. What none of them mention is that the gap widens for European extensions specifically, because there is far less competition on .nl and .eu than on .com. Wholesale, a .nl costs a registrar somewhere around €3.50 from SIDN and a .eu around €4 from EURid. Charge €25.99 and €38.99 for those and the markup is not a margin, it is a bet that you will not check.
We lost that bet for years. In fairness, so does nearly everyone. Renewal invoices arrive once a year, they are small enough to ignore, and comparing them means understanding transfer codes and nameservers.
What twelve domains cost us in euros, before and after
Here is the real comparison, with the prices we verified on 18 August 2026. Prices change, so treat the date as part of the data.
| Question | Versio | mijn.host |
|---|---|---|
| .nl renewal, per year | €25.99 | €4.99 |
| .com renewal, per year | €36.99 | €12.99 |
| .eu renewal, per year | €38.99 | €6.99 |
| Twelve domains, per year | €379.88 | €101.88 |
| Invoiced in | Euros, Dutch VAT | Euros, Dutch VAT |
| DNS via API | No | Yes, full CRUD |
The saving is €278 a year, which is not life-changing money. What made it worth doing is that it repeats every year, forever, for work we did once. Over the ten years these domains have left in them, that is close to €2,800.
The cheapest european domain registrar is not on the usual lists
This is the part that sent us in circles, and it is the reason we wrote this down. Search for the cheapest registrar in English and you get well-built, frequently-updated ranking pages. We measured the top three: 753, 1,985 and 2,372 words, all with live price tables. They are good at what they do.
They are also, between them, completely useless to a European business. Across all three pages, the strings .nl, .eu, euro and VAT appear zero times. Every price is in dollars, every comparison is about .com. Follow their advice and you hit one of two walls:
- Cloudflare Registrar tops every list because it sells at wholesale with no markup. It also does not sell .nl and does not sell .eu. For seven of our twelve domains it was not an option at any price.
- Porkbun is genuinely cheap and does carry both. It invoices in dollars, from the United States, without a European VAT number. If you reclaim VAT, your bookkeeper now has a currency conversion and a reverse-charge line for a €7 domain.
And the local option that looks cheapest is often the one running the oldest play in the book. TransIP advertises domains from €0.49. Renew our same twelve domains at their standard rates and you land at €265.94 a year, which is better than what we were paying and more than twice what we pay now. That is the identical mechanism that got us into this in the first place, wearing a different coat.
Hidden domain renewal fees that only surface in year two
Once you start reading invoices properly, the sticker price turns out to be one line of several. Four things to check before you decide anything is cheap:
- WHOIS privacy as a paid extra. It should be included. For .nl it is effectively standard, for .com it is often €5 to €10 a year unless the registrar absorbs it.
- Renewal at a different price than registration. Obvious, universally ignored. Look up the renewal price on the pricing page, not the banner.
- Charging for the transfer out. ICANN forbids this for gTLDs, but registrars have been known to make the process obstructive instead.
- The auto-renewal window. Some registrars charge 60 days before expiry, which means cancelling late still costs you a full year.
None of this is fraud. It is all disclosed somewhere. It works because it is boring, and boring is the most reliable pricing strategy there is. The same logic applies to hosting, backups and plugin licences, which is why we keep a yearly maintenance calendar instead of trusting ourselves to remember.
Is moving your existing portfolio worth the effort?
Honest answer: it depends entirely on how many domains you have, and it is less work than you think.
A .nl transfer is free and lands in under an hour. You request a transfer token from your current registrar, paste it at the new one, and it is done, usually within thirty minutes. A .com costs one year of renewal, which is added to your existing expiry date rather than replacing it, so you do not lose the time you already paid for. A .eu sits in between.
For one domain, the saving is €20 and the answer is probably no. For twelve, it was an afternoon that pays €278 a year. Somewhere around four or five domains it stops being a hobby and starts being maintenance worth doing. If you would rather not touch any of it, this is exactly the kind of thing that sits inside a care plan, and you are welcome to ask us to look at your stack before you renew anything.
What happens to your DNS when you transfer?
This is the part that actually carries risk, and the part every price comparison skips.
Transferring a domain does not move your DNS records. Several registrars will point the domain at their own nameservers and generate a fresh default zone: an A record to their parking page, MX records to their mail servers, an SPF line for a mail service you do not use. The moment that delegation takes effect, your site shows a parking page and your mail goes to a server that has never heard of you.
We hit this on the first domain we moved, and caught it because we were watching. The fix is simple once you know: export your zone before you start, and replace the default zone immediately after the transfer completes, before the nameserver change propagates. You typically have about an hour, which is the TTL on the delegation.
Two records deserve a second look while you are in there. Ours had an MX 20 pointing at the same server as MX 10, so there was no failover at all, and it had been like that for years. Nobody notices a backup mail server until they need one. It is the same category of quiet breakage as a site that ranks but never gets checked, which is why we like reading Search Console once a month.
What we would tell a European business owner
Do not start by choosing a registrar. Start by opening your last renewal invoice and writing down what you actually paid per domain. Most people cannot say the number without looking, which is the whole point.
Then compare that against the wholesale reality: a .nl should be under €7, a .com under €15, a .eu under €10, all invoiced in euros with a VAT number you can put in your books. If your registrar is more than double any of those, you are paying for inertia.
And if the price is fine but you have no idea what your DNS is doing, that is the more expensive problem of the two. A domain costs €5. An hour of mail landing on the wrong server costs considerably more.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my domain renewal so expensive?
Because the first-year price you compared was promotional and the renewal price is the real one. For European extensions the gap is wider than for .com, because there is less competition on .nl and .eu. Wholesale a .nl is roughly €3.50 and a .eu roughly €4, so anything above €10 is markup rather than cost.
Is there a cheap eu domain registrar that invoices with VAT?
Yes, but you will not find it in English-language rankings, which are written for the American .com market. Look for a registrar established in the EU that is an accredited SIDN and EURid registrar and shows prices excluding VAT. We moved to mijn.host and pay €6.99 for a .eu and €4.99 for a .nl, invoiced in euros with a Dutch VAT number. We have no affiliation with them and get nothing for saying so.
Can I transfer my domain to another registrar?
Yes, for every common extension. You request an authorisation code, sometimes called an EPP code or transfer token, from your current registrar and enter it at the new one. For .com you also need to switch off the transfer lock first. Domains registered or transferred within the last 60 days cannot move again yet.
Do I have to pay to transfer a domain?
For .nl and .eu the transfer itself is usually free. For .com and other gTLDs you pay one year of renewal, which is added to your current expiry date rather than replacing it, so you keep the time you already paid for. Your old registrar is not allowed to charge you for leaving.
What happens if you don’t renew a domain?
It expires and stops working, usually within a day. Most extensions then enter a grace period of about 30 days in which you can still reclaim it, followed by a redemption period where reclaiming it costs considerably more. For .nl there is a 40-day quarantine. After that anyone can register it.
In closing
This is not a thrilling saving. Twelve domains, €278 a year, one afternoon. It will not change anyone’s business, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What it did change is the assumption underneath it. We had been paying four times market rate for years, on a recurring invoice, without ever asking. That same assumption is almost certainly sitting somewhere else in your stack: a hosting plan you outgrew, a plugin licence for something you removed, an email package for a mailbox nobody reads.
If you want a second pair of eyes on what your website is quietly costing you, that is more or less what our website check is for. No obligation, and if everything is fine we will say so.
