Most of my domains are registered with Google Domains. I don't have a problem with Google, but I recently considered probing the market to see if there were cheaper registrars. My thinking was that since I use my own nameservers, I should not be paying for my registrar's nameserver costs. So I went on a little quest to try to find some obscure domain registrars that may or may not also provide nameservers. So long as the registrar lets me bring my own nameserver, set glue records, and set DNSSEC records... they are all the same and I won't be losing quality by going with the absolute cheapest.
The only surefire way to find the cheapest registrars would be to download a CSV file of ICANN's list of accredited registrars, parse out the URLs of registrars opertating in the USA, and visit all of their ~185 websites to compare prices. Obviously no sane person would do this... because I already did it for you!
I only checked a few TLDs, and these were the yearly renewal fees (on 2022-01-22):
| sav.com | Cosmo Town | mydomain.com | Pork Bun | NameSilo | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .com | $12.00 | $8.69 | $8.55 | $9.99 | $9.13 | $9.95 |
| .net | $12.00 | $9.88 | $9.49 | $12.99 | $10.56 | $11.69 |
| .org | $12.00 | $10.15 | $7.39 | $8.99 | $10.72 | $10.69 |
| .pw | $9.00 | $15.76 | $17.89 | |||
| .us | $12.00 | $6.95 | $8.99 | $7.00 | $7.89 | |
| .band | $20.00 | $15.74 | $13.99 | $16.97 | $18.89 |
The blank spots in the table are TLDs that aren't supported by that registrar.
^ 2022/01