The wholesale price of a .com domain name charged by Verisign (the .com registry operator) is approaching $10/year. I currently pay a little more than $11/year including the additional ICANN fee for my .com domain names at GoDaddy.

This morning, Namecheap and Spaceship Founder and CEO Richard Kirkendall announced that Spaceship is offering .com domain names for $4.98. There is no coupon or promo code necessary, and apparently there is no limit to how many domain names can be registered.

The promotion was posted on X:

Starting today we are offering .com domains for $4.98 at Spaceship dot com. No coupon is necessary and no limit. Enjoy 😃🚀🔥

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) January 13, 2025

I do not believe this discount includes inbound domain name transfers, and it does not include domain name renewals.

In looking through some of the comments, it appears the tech team is still working on the implementation of this, but that may have been resolved by the time of publication.

I suspect this promotion is a loss leader aimed at building the domains under management (DUM) for Spaceship. According to Domain Name Stat, Spaceship has just about 2.1 million DUM.

Thanks to Iv Mon for sharing this with me.