Some customers are told to pay plan fees in order to retain discounts.
Domain name registrar Uniregistry rolled out a new discount plan at the beginning of the month that requires a monthly subscription.
I was alerted to the plan by a Uniregistry customer who says he was informed his prices would go up unless he subscribed to one of the plans. I have only 22 domains registered at Uniregistry and have not received any such notice.
The plans charge a fee to activate discounts on new and renewal billing. The cheapest plan is $108 per year.
It appears that the best plan offers .com domains for $8.59 compared to Uniregistry’s standard pricing of $10.88.
Interestingly, the plans are more expensive if you have more domains under management. GoDaddy has offered its Domain Discount Club for a long time and it charges the same fee no matter how many domains you have under management.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Uniregistry waives the discount fees on larger portfolios. I can’t imagine the company losing a 50,000 domain portfolio over a $219-per-month surcharge.
Taking a page out of the Amazon Prime and Netflix subscription model playbook… All while their parking program is still not working properly for days now. Bad timing.
Bye bye uniregistry! Just transferred all names out
I was already transfering my .com to Godaddy. It’s sad that Uniregistry doesn’t have afternic integration..
Do you know those big guys make uni $5-20K in commissions per month on the follow up, and access to their portfolios, plus all the data from their sales in regards to keywords, and extensions. That is priceless info to squeeze a portfolio holder for $100 a year, uniregisty should be rebating these big accounts, not making them pay a monthly fee. Bad enough your client competes against you in the marketplaces, now charging a sub fee is insult to injury.
The guy has a point imo. Users are giving Uniregistry access to a lot of valuable information and data through the marketplace.
Yes, that exact data Taryn uses to outbid you on namejet etc… with your commission dollars. How many of us in the offline world would support businesses that compete with us, and make us pay more for other services. Makes no friggin sense to me, why domainers keep bending over.
I think this is a failed experiment that is going to go very bad, and maybe a top up of bad GTLD investments. I hate it when companies make clients pay for their mistakes.
i think its rather pathetic and told them so. they said it was necessary to make a more viable long term business model..
Does a subscription come with a free rum cake? Or another e postcard again :-s
For me, in the end i saved a couple hundred (after the cost of the plan) over the discount they had given me back when i signed up.
You have to be careful the savings price has the full retail ask price as the guide making the savings look larger than usual.
As well the scale of the per month costs tends to increase by the amount of domains you own. You can actually save money if you have 4000 domains, and transferring out 500 domains, and coming to 3500 so you only pay $49 per month, as opposed to $99 per month for having just 500 extra domains which puts you into the next price class of up to 9500.
Yeah, I didn’t realize they are charing more when you own more domains. What a joke! Not even godaddy does this. I love Uniregistry’s panel but I guess its time to move…again.
Yes, they are going for the kill as the plan goes from 3500 domains for $49 per month, to $99 for up to 9500 domains. I am guessing a large core of their domain users are in that 5k zone so they are just gouging then with that huge spread in account sizes. It is very sad to see after how people were lambasting domainers for not supporting a domainer owned registry.
First it was the gtld price hikes, that even made godaddy pull their registrations to protect their own clients, there is little trust left here sadly to say.
Is the subscription fee charged on a monthly or for 12 month upfront?
All upfront payment, after the fact who cares if you stay or go, they got your money, just like their payment plans, they take their commission of the first payment, so even if the buyer makes 1 payment, and cancels you get peanuts, but they get paid first.
How long will my Domain Perks last?
All plans are annual and are billed as a single payment once per year on the date the plan was purchased.
I am out, moving my 2k domain elsewhere!
For anyone looking for a new home for their domains, I would say come to Epik for all-inclusive, competitive pricing plus no club fees and no nonsense.
Marketplace inquiries from our parking landers provide registrants with the full contact details of the persons inquiring. You can sell through Epik or not.
In general, I find it laughable that there are domainers who place parking landers on their own domains but don’t get to see identity of the visitor. SMH.
Why pay for priority customer service when you can just go to Godaddy and get it for free?
I only just got the email a couple of days ago, so I think they are letting people know in stages to evaluate the response.
Time to look into alternative options.
Epik, Namesilo are going to get a lot of these domains into their stream, both of those companies have similar landing page setups, and monthly payment platforms.
Don’t forget you can transfer to Internet.bs! We know what Uniregistry apparently doesn’t, low pricing and a great system is a viable long term business model if you keep your costs low.
This is going to backfire on them.
More of the same bait and switch coming from Uniregistry, very disappointing.
No wonder all their brokers quit, they have no customer loyalty, and looks like they treat their employees in the same manner.
Not qualities you want to see in a business you support your dollars with. Considering these guys are online 24/7 they can’t even come and defend their fly by night customer shakedown.
I have over a dozen emails, and phone calls from these clowns telling me how they can give me better pricing if I move my domains over, glad I didn’t buy it.
Doesn’t worry me. I’m going to continue adding 5-10 domains a week to Uniregistry to supplement the 1,700 I already have there.
Any registrar that doesn’t offer some exceptional service (such as an industry leading sales platform, site builder or associated drop catcher) is just a commodity service provider and you might as well shop around for the lowest price.
In the case of Uniregistry, the integrated market with their expert brokers and instant transfers helps me to sell around $100,000 in domains per year.
In the recent Domain Name Wire podcast (recorded in late September 2018) Jeff Gabriel (Uniregistry Sales VP) stated that sales are tracking to be dramatically higher this year compared to last:
“Last year was a great year for us in sales in general. It was our biggest or largest year in sales volume that we’ve ever had but then looking at it now in 2018 we’re going to far surpass that so I was quite happy with the accomplishments we made in 2017… we finished a little bit above $40M in sales and then this year we’re tracking to break $60M in sales in 2018.”
https://domainnamewire.com/2018/10/01/domain-sales-in-2018-jeff-gabriel-dnw-podcast-204/
In 2017 sales to the end of August were about $25M compared to about $35M this year. If the company reaches the goal of $60M for the year, that would translate to an average of about $1.15M in sales a week. That is the mark of an industry leading platform.
If Uniregistry needs to do this to ensure a more viable business model…
…then any claims made regarding how well they are doing is suspect.
If things are so good, why alienate your clients now, why not wait till things get choppy.
We see Uniregistry sell domains for 6 figures every week, they are really pressing their clients at the wrong time with no warning.
Epik has offered approx $6 transfer outs with 2 compounded discounts, we are going with that, and getting a 1 year renewal and a transfer out of jail card. Didn’t want to do this, but we had no choice.
Well if sales are that good why raise prices?
Here was their form response…Good thing my personal account manager took 4 days to answer 🙂
Thanks for reaching out to us.
I can completely understand any reservations or concerns about these upcoming changes, however, there are large savings compared to our standard pricing, as well as additional perks such as priority support, dedicated account management, discounts on premium names, and discounts on more TLDs than you did previously, along with the usual benefits of Uniregistry such as our beautiful interface, powerful domain management tools, our amazing mobile apps, and access to the Uniregistry Market. The new pricing structure was created for our customers to be able to self value and be able to self select their own pricing based on their own needs.
I have to say, it is a shame that you don’t hold the same value for our platform as we do, but you have to make decisions that are best for you from a business point of view, the same as we have had to make the decision to change our pricing structure.
Kind regards,
Rhys Haldane
Account Manager
Value ? Lets see you can still use the market place even if you dont have a large portfolio, plus I dont know about you but there support was average at best..GD will accommodate everything I will need.
This guy is also a support tech and aka your account manager. I guess you need to upgrade to the Elite Package to get 4 days faster support.
Uni is worth it. Buying Elite
Why pay for priority customer service when you can just go to Godaddy and get it for free?
So… I have 50 .com domain names. Using their calculator, on their website it would cost me $544 to register / renew those 50 domains. With the Elite perk, I would save $114.50. However, the Elite perk cost $15 /m, billed yearly, which is $180.
Has anyone calculated at what point this becomes a good idea? Since Andrew already mentioned this doesn’t make sense for the 50K domain owners either.
It depends on what you consider worthwhile. Based on your numbers you are getting a saving of 2.29 per domain with the Elite perk versus their standard price, the elite perk gives you $8.59 per domain. Buying the elite perk if you have less than 79 names is not worthwhile because the saving does not cover the cost of the subscription. Have the elite perk and 100 names and you are paying $10.39, once you get to 450 domains you are paying $8.99. Most competitor registrars will be priced about $8.99 and not charge you a fee so you are getting the benefit of that discount after the 450th domain. Of course most of those registrars have lower than 8.99 pricing for bigger customers. In the case of a registrar like Internet.bs you can get $8.49 per domain as long as you have 500 domains under management, no fee, so really you are only getting the benefit of that elite perk between 450 and 500 domains if you compare it to that registrar. I guess it might not be enough of a difference if you are a Uniregistry fan so that is probably what they are banking on.