Gandi.net – Pricing Update
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“No bullshit” is no more. https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit
That promise is what justified their slightly higher prices. With it broken, I have no reason not to transfer to a less expensive registrar. So that I’ve now done, and Gandi can try to win me back next year.
Notification has been delayed for customers in some countries (not UK especially) it seems.
French customer here btw.
The dark pattern seems to have worked as many here are still discussing only the mail hosting announcement in which the change to their core service was buried.
I have a mailbox there for my domain so I hope they can introduce some easy way to just pre-pay for a longer period.
Next best was proton mail (seems it's a bit cheaper now, $48/yr)
I'd love to hear arguments for another service that's cheaper than that for just a few accounts. I don't really want/need all the extra document collaboration tools other services provide and I definitely don't want yet another Google/Microsoft account.
I haven't used it and not sure if it even has a web client, but for the 99c you can use a custom domain according to the ads.
I'd really hate to move domains and email again, I just moved everything a year ago.
My problem was that not only did Google changed my price from free to way to expensive, but my DNS provider closed at the same time, so I needed to migrate both things at the same time. Pretty annoying.
That does suck, it's not really a huge amount but a tad much for _just_ email (compared to Google Apps or MS365).
This is announcing the shutdown of their previous offering 5 months in advance. I'd call that a forewarning.
The email I got today was pretty clear and no-BS, it says flat out that pricing changes are effective in 30 days for "all our existing services and the new Mailbox service" - price hikes aren't exactly fun, but my domain is registered out for a few years already and I'm using their email service for free... so is 30-day notice of a pricing increase _truly_ only 30 days notice? Not really, not for a vendor whom I only pay annually in advance.
Notably the existing, free GandiMail service stays up until November which is the part I was worried about. So this seems fine to me, I am happy to become a paying customer for email and they've made this easy by giving me plenty of time to onboard. Domain registry fees are already cheap, I don't really care about paying a little more to keep my domain. For my TLD it looks like prices are going up the equivalent of 60 cents per month.
I have been freeloading on GandiMail for several years and it's been great. I am happy to pay $4/mo for a standard inbox (at least while I shop around) especially if they are upgrading their product. Currently GandiMail's MFA scheme is pretty crappy/broken so I am excited to see what I'll be able to get in return for my money after they complete their changes.
How do you know they're adding Sieve support? The email just says "Better anti-spam"
The email also says "Stronger email server security" which I hope means they are fixing their MFA scheme - I've sent an email to their new support address to confirm this.
In my Gandi portal I don't yet have an option to switch to "new" GandiMail. I figure their docs aren't updated yet either. Your legacy mailbox probably already supports Sieve.
Since I've only been paying for domain registration while using email for free, I feel that I can't complain as much, at least not in good faith.
Still, both the freebies and the paying customers get 6 months to decide which is all I can really ask for. GandiMail has plenty of room for improvement so as long as they can justify the cost increase, I'll consider staying.
I think we as customers have to manage expectations and at least let the vendor process their changes before making our decisions. That's what the 6-month period is for. If thousands of customers take flight immediately after the announcement, the rest of us might end up with a lesser service than we otherwise would've. It has to be subsidized somehow, clearly domain registration fees weren't doing the job.
The free email is the only thing that kept me with them.
Maybe some people got the information 3 months ago, but definitely not all of customers.
Looked up the WHOIS records a minute later, and my phone number, name and email were all there. Those were .com, .org and .net domains.
They mostly phased-out the "no bullshit" slogan from all of their branding with the v5 migration in 2018. It went from being in the homepage's <title> and the first thing you see on the homepage[1] and in the header at the top of every page to being just a tiny link under "About Us" in the homepage's footer[2].
I get phasing it out, to be more "business friendly" or whatever; but doing it at the same time as the big v5 UI and accounts overhaul... it seemed to me to be an admission that the fancy new Javascript UI was bullshit.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180104001527/https://www.gandi...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20181230012842/https://www.gandi...
The actual price increases are listed here[0].
For example, currently a .com domain can be renewed for $17.75/year (tax inclusive - I personally renewed a .com domain for the maximum of 4 years tonight). After the increase this will be $23.99/year (26% increase).
I've been a long time (sometime prior to 2007) Gandi customer and ignored previous discussion concerns[1], but this will be the last time I renew my domains with Gandi. The v4->v5 user interface change was painful at first, but they have fixed most of those UX issues - at least as far as the DNS support, which is all I really use. But their service is definitely not worth the premium.
[0] https://www.gandi.net/static/documents/2023-july-usd-renew-p...
Not affiliated, just a happy customer.
Looking at my last invoice, I paid ~£26/year for a .info domain. If I'm reading this right, it's now ~£36/yr.
That's a ~40% increase.
Glad I renewed for nine years last year.
Given the speed with which Gandi is circling down the drain I won't be surprised if they annul that renewal at some point later on.
I just looked and dot io is $70 a year! I pay around $40.
I run my own name server on my VPS so I chose Gandi because they provide free secondary name servers – but then discovered that their secondary name servers don’t support NOTIFY (or IXFR). Instead they make an AXFR transfer on a fixed schedule – that’s too slow for Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication.
So far, I’ve stayed with them because I don’t have many domains registered and I appreciate their commitment to security of user accounts: the ability to lock domains, and MFA support. These are now standard but I also have my account to set up to only allow logins from various IP network ranges.
Edit: Also, their web interface for managing domains was intuitive and easy-to-use (no dark patterns). It was particularly easy to configure glue records for my primary name server.
> Je dois livrer un chiffre qui, s’il n’est pas confidentiel, mérite cependant le détour. […] Le coût réel de l’enregistrement d’un nom dans la base de données mondiale, y compris le coût de fonctionnement d’une telle base, a été évalué en 1999 à... trente cents.
> […] Et parmi ceux que l’ICANN a choisis pour participer à ce jeu, il y a une petite SARL bien française, Gandi, créée pour l’occasion par quatre fous qui ne comprenaient pas que l’on puisse vendre aussi cher un objet somme toute totalement virtuel. Et moi je suis l’un de ces fous qui, depuis plus d’un an maintenant, vend du vent lui aussi. Ce que NSI vend toujours trente-cinq dollars, Gandi le vend douze euros après l’avoir acheté au prix de gros (six dollars) à NSI. Et ça rapporte énormément, de vendre du vent
summary: in 1999, the per-domain cost for a registrar was around $0.3, NSI sold it to its customers around $35, and had to sell it to $6 to its competitors, and Gandi sold it for twice as much, with almost zero expenses on their side.
source: http://www.confessions-voleur.net/confessions.pdf p123-125
What an unethical move, they rescind already paid contracts/accounts and the price hike is insane. The went from "no BS" to full of it.
I intend to move all my domains. I also paid for the "premium" email service. But it went from 25€ per year to 86€ ! Domains are also getting a price hike and web hosting too. Time to move
A .re domain is €14.28 with Gandi and €43.99 with iwantmyname.
That aside, they're fine.
When registrars requires users to divulge their private information, they become bound to fight tooth and nail to protect it for as long as they retain it.
Screw INWX for betraying their customers. Screw them.
"Your data", like what? The domains you own and their full whois entries?
> with no obligations not to notify me
While this might be true, they might have seen a risk in notifying you (at least while investigations were ongoing), consider e.g. https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/258.html
Also, how did you come to know about all this? Who notified you in the end?
Single domain in, WHOIS data out.
> While this might be true, they might have seen a risk in notifying you (at least while investigations were ongoing), consider e.g. https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/258.html
I have a copy of the correspondence from Bundesamt fuer Justiz.
> Also, how did you come to know about all this? Who notified you in the end?
The cops questioning me did. I was actually under investigation for a different thing related to this website, so my lawyer got them to confirm it was indeed possibly related. They then dropped that investigation immediately, after months of nothing being added to the file (which I also have). While holding a pretty substantial bit of my hardware hostage. Weird how police work can be expedited when charges are obviously based on police not understanding how the internet (and Paragraph 10 TMG) works and they need to get something done for BfJ. Or maybe they did understand, but didn't want to afford those protections to an individual without commercial interest.
Mind that this was about 10 years ago by now.
These are renewal prices in euro for A rate.
Current prices: https://www.gandi.net/pdf/en/Gandi_Domain_Prices_EUR_A_NOVAT... (second column)
Futur prices: https://www.gandi.net/static/documents/2023-july-eur-renew-p...
- .cloud : 21.13 -> 29.99
- .com : 15.51 -> 19.99
- .dev : 14.01 -> 19.99
- .es : 12.47 -> 19.99
- .eu : 13.90 -> 19.99
- .gr : 12.47 -> 19.99
- .info : 26.75 -> 34.99
- .io : 49.00 -> 59.99
- .net : 18.99 -> 24.99
- .nl : 14.04 -> 19.99
- .org : 16.22 -> 19.99
- .page : 14.13 -> 19.99
- .quebec : 33.30 -> 39.99
- .social : 40.06 -> 49.99
- .us : 13.30 -> 19.99Never quite understood it as the attitude persisted even as my complaint was (apparently) escalated.
The chargeback itself sent them into orbit.
The only domain I have left at Gandi is a .ag (since Porkbun don't do .ag) and an orphaned .eu (because Brexit took that from me). There's nothing I can do with the .eu, so that's gonna languish until 2027.
The .ag domain is going up from 79EUR to 95EUR soon. Time to find a new registrar for that straggler. Even though I can renew at 79EUR now I'm inclined to take the renewal somewhere else.
Edit: could be a coincidence, could be a ccTLD thing, but the auth code that used to be viewable on the Transfer tab at Gandi is no longer there. Strange.
I'm reading the messages of people saying that they had paid for their domains like 10 years in advance but they are going to have to start paying for their mailboxes, which is a breach of contract.
These people are just pieces of shit.
Fuck you, Gandi.net
Was bought in 2019 too, by a private equity firm
Can anyone recommend a registrar outside the US that has decent security? Some mentioned OVH and their CTO is a classmate of mine, but the French government is showing worrisome authoritarian trends and I'd prefer a country with strong protections for freedom of speech like Iceland or Norway or that has strong regulation of its spooks like Germany (because of their experience with the Stasi).
That's regular reach.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information-tec...
Some people have strong stances because they chose not to continue supporting Russian sites last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/7o0hid/transferr...
A 5 year old link with a vague "confirmation" that it's still happening is not exactly damning evidence, either. They could have certainly considered themselves the #1 host until last year. A lot of things changed last year.
Godaddy is the bottom feader, gandi was the best, but now with these prices I've switched.
I love capitalism in general, but PE firms are mostly a net-negative. They try to squeeze profit out of a company while owning it for 3-5 years, and then selling it at a higher multiple. They usually do this by cutting R&D, jacking up prices and cutting costs (for example moving HQ to some remote area, losing half of staff in the process, but hey, costs are down in Q3…).
Good firms are those that have stable owners and leadership over 20+ years. At that time span, it's obvious that short-sighted cost cutting and customer-hostile behavior is just stupid, which is why fewer such firms does it.
They were bought again.
Existing years of registration transfer, minimum 1 additional year required purchase for migration.
The website actually works.
Namecheap's legal name shows up as "! #1 Host Russia, Inc", which is a bit weird, especially this year, as their customer support org is in Ukraine.
In other words, whoever controls the registration controls the nameservers, and whoever controls the nameservers controls the MX records, and whoever controls the MX records can reset passwords. (Ideally, we'd all be using MFA for every possible thing, but in practice that may not be possible for the hundreds of services one might be using.)
Gandi also has a nice API to manage the domains. I use that with a simple shell script to have my own dynamic DNS.
So if your usage is as limited as mine, no major differences really.
In steady state, most registrars seem equivalent, and the main difference is how they handle billing.
I would have to pay for those 2 mail addresses associated with my domain if I stay with Gandi, is that correct?
(I do not use there web interfaces, I access my accounts via POP3/IMAP)
I've used them because they seemed the most reputable in the murky world of domain name providers.
I'd say Wedos is no-bs enough.
I hope referral is not a problem on HN: https://www.wedos.com/?ap=Fy1vRJ
What's this?
> Based on advice here I just tried Porkbun. A not-quite-professional website that prefers making jokes to fixing layout bugs, I try to sign up and the symbols in my password cause it to fail with a 403 (!!). I'm super scared about their technical abilities and general security. Are we going to see another Gandi 6 mo down the line?
> Domains are the keys to the internet atm, it would be nice to see someone take it seriously.
>
> Edit: I guess I'll try realtimeregister, since I haven't seen anything negative and they support U2F per Yubikey's catalog.
>
> Edit2: Cool, cool, when you sign up they assign you a non-random password which anyone can use to log in and view your personal information.
>
> Edit3: Others with u2f support that aren't MAMAA: Cloudflare (close), OVH, DNSimple (accounts are $60/year)
Cloudflare doesn't allow you to point the nameservers elsewhere which made migration painful. I went with DNSimple.
(They call it "Mobile TAN" which is the phrase often used in german to describe SMS-based MFA but has slowly expanded to also describe U2F/Fido/etc.)
It's not the cheapest, but the pricing is stable and predictable, the tools are good and I can automate swapping subdomains if an IP changes trivially.
Do I understand correctly that they have a recurrent charge for domain DNS records?
- Fastmail and Protonmail are good options for email
I must say the "free" emails were nice to send low-volume emails from my side-projects.
I will probably move my domains to Infomaniak, they have a good reputation.
Using gandi because it handles my-country-specific payment systems (aka no credit card to provide online, and no need of a big tech web engine, like steam wallet codes).
But after seeing this headline on HN, I realised that actually that email was probably about a pricing update. Went back to my inbox and sure enough, the subject of the email says pricing update.
Anyway, it seems to be mainly about DNS and email services, etc, none of which I use.
I only use Gandi as registrar for domain names. And then for the DNS I use Cloudflare. For email I use iCloud.
The fact that it doubled is bad, but I guess everyone will vote with their wallet and market will regulate itself.
If I were to leave them, I don't even know who I would turn to instead.
GoDaddy? Hell naw.
Google Domains? No thanks.
Cloudflare Registrar? Rather not put all my eggs in one basket. Plus, I don't necessarily trust Cloudflare to be registrar for my domains altough I am happy to use their DNS service and their Cloudflare Pages service.
I want to use a company with human tech support in case something goes wrong one day. No tech giants.
Pricing is reasonable and the limited support interaction I've had has been good.
The webmail seems to be OX [1].
1. EU/EEA/Switzerland
2. DNSSEC
3. DNS hosting (with DNSSEC support)
4. WebAuth/FIDO2 2nd factor (with ability to add multiple keys and recovery codes)
https://aws.amazon.com/route53/domain-registration-agreement...
> AWS provides the Domain Name Registration Services through ICANN-accredited registrars. AWS currently provides Domain Name Registration Services through Gandi SAS , Mesh Digital Limited, Amazon Registrar, Inc., and other ICANN-accredited registrars (the “Registrar”), and your use of the Domain Name Registration Services is subject to their terms.
However, there's a lot work left to be done as we do not want to simply dump all the emails in one folder, but match the folders that you had used previously. Because of this, the release is a few more months into the future. Thanks for your patience!
Will tutanota support webmail and app for that domain?