Thanks for pointing that out, it wasn't clear to me who's responsible for that price. I added your comment as a footnote to the relevant sentence. [1]
But no matter who's responsible I think it's not right to ask someone to pay more than 19 times the price of the normal renewal just because they might have forgotton to renew. I'd have paid maybe €50 but €185 is borderline extortion in my opinion.
I can assure you, I have not gotten any kind of notification from Namecheap. I don't know why some people here are so insistent that I must have gotten them. I triple checked my email address at Namecheap and don't do spam filtering. If some mail isn't in my inbox it hasn't been sent.