They were sold to another company a year or two ago and now some people are a bit wary
i am guessing they are milking their existing customers who don't notice or don't have the knowhow or resources to move their domains, and once those wise up to that they will lose a lot of them
apart from prices their operation didn't seem to change after the sale. although i only have a few domains so i probably didn't interact with them enough to notice anything else
seems like gandi didn't just multiply the prices but raised them exponentially.
beware of namecheap though. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364240
I point my nameservers somewhere else and then forget about Namecheap for a year.