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Can you comment on a reply below that claims there was promotional pricing in 2019 at launch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929132

I think they're referring to the Early Access Program, which was a one-time pre-launch Dutch auction in advance of general availability. Note that that is orthogonal to a domain being premium or not. During the last day of EAP, you might have seen the price of a non-premium domain be something like $130+12/yr. Whereas for a ~$70/yr premium domain, it'd have been something like $130+70/yr.

Regardless, forum.dev was registered in 2021 (you can confirm via WHOIS), which was long after the Early Access Program for .dev ended in 2019.

You stated here that they paid $850 to initially register the domain name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929354

Do you have proof of the initial price paid for registration or is this in some part speculation?

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33929472 they checked in their system that the domain was billed as premium upon initial registration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com