[aeden]

Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have.

There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each zone and then for the DNS queries.

The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.

The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).

Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.

To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.

[paulddraper]

> rising prices of infrastructure

What does this refer to? (It sounds like servers, and those are certainly not getting more expensive.)

[aeden]

We run a combination of managed hardware and virtual hardware. The prices for both have indeed gone up significantly since we launched some of our earliest plans. We don't have the luxury of using a cloud provider like AWS for our Anycast DNS infrastructure, thus we are limited to our choices. Furthermore the cost for network transit has gone up, as has the cost of ancillary services we use to operate our network (such as tooling for alerting, observability, etc).

[spl757]

[flagged]