GoDaddy and the .gay TLD

First off, GoDaddy is a terrible company. While i’m not like going in-depth on why I hate them so much, just do some research on them, or try to use their services. They’ll overcharge you for everything. Use Porkbun, Namecheap, or Cloudflare for domains, I beg you.

With that out of the way, back in 2021 they acquired all of Top Level Design’s domains. These include .design, .wiki, and .gay (see wikipedia). Since then, the cost of the domain has gone up substantially year-over-year, much more than any other TLD i’ve owned.

From ~$25.93 in 2020 to when I purchased, to $28.32 this year and $33 coming April 2026. (source)

Like seriously, a 27% increase over 3 years? Meanwhile, most other domains, like .com or .ca have increased maybe only $3-4, at an already cheaper price-point of what ends up being a $9 -> $13 increase.

I entirely blame GoDaddy for this as well, they decide the costs and I think they know how special/niche having a .gay TLD is.

They also fail to remove abusive content towards the LGBTQ+ community from the TLD in a timely manner (see ilovefemboys.gay), contradicting one of the main selling points of the TLD. It finally got a clientHold placed on it :D, still took a while though.

Because of all of this, I’m deciding to start sunsetting most of my .gay domains besides this one. I won’t be purchasing more unless the prices go down for renewals (which I doubt), and will look into moving off of arti.gay by the time it’s up for renewal next.

Affected Domains

• imreally.gay - Sunsetting Transferred to a friend
• arti.gay - No action yet

arti.gay might move at least in part to a domain like arti.meow, assuming the project to create it is successful!!

thx for reading c: