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Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

  > I get it, it was a "consumer" product essentially, hence selling the
  > business to Squarespace instead of someone like Cloudflare.

Ironically, I moved all my Google Domains domains to Cloudflare. Their revenue from being a domain registrar is likely a rounding error compared to their other products, but (1) now they have my credit card on file for value-add services, and (2) sometimes people with corporate spending authority ask me for advice about who they should buy cloud services from.

Grocery stores don't make their money from selling bread and milk, but a store that doesn't sell bread and milk is run by fools.

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The obvious go-to choice was Cloudflare for us too, but then it turned out you can't use CF just as a registrar (at least on the basic plan or equivalent), you need to use Cloudflare's nameservers as well... But we use Google's Cloud DNS for everything, so that was a showstopper. In the end we went with AWS Route 53.

CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.

If I'm not mistaken, it is possible, but not on the free tier.

I don’t think it’s the case even on a paid tier, if it is I can’t find any reference to it. There are a lot of posts on their community support form where the recommendation is to use another registrar. https://community.cloudflare.com/t/use-cloudflare-registrar-...

I do see an option for custom nameservers on my dashboard, followed by a button "upgrade to business".

That option means "your nameservers are now ns1/ns2 on your domain but they still map to Cloudflare", not "you get to pick your own third-party nameservers".

I see, thanks.

> CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.

Why would they want that? The whole point of CF as a registrar was so you could use the other services. The registrar is sold at cost. It's a way to lock you in.

It would lower the barrier to switch to Cloudflare for new customers, and once they are inside with a credit card on file it’s arguably easier to explore their product offerings

It's already "free". How much lower should it be?

So that's not the use of the domains. It's to make it easier / lock in existing customers.

Why not Cloud Domains?

you mean google cloud domains? They shut it down together with google domains (it still runs, but you cannot register a new domain).

They shouldn't have any revenue from registering domains because they sell them at cost. It's probably the opposite because of all the overhead (which is of course compensated by pulling in more clients as you explained).

Revenue is not profit

Great analogy.

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