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Comment by madsushi | Hacker News Reader

It costs ~$200,000 to apply for a TLD, and there's an ongoing renewal cost in the tens of thousands of USD.

For this application round, ICANN is running an Applicant Support Program, or ASP. The applicants seeking to apply for a TLD this round who qualify for the ASP will have a substantially reduced application fee, among other benefits. Our organization is one such org who has qualified for the ASP so we will not have to pay the full $227,000 application fee.

How much is the reduced fee then? As I understand it's somewhere between 75-85% less, which is still a lot of money.

Also, who is paying for the reduced fee, administrative and infra costs? And have you actually submitted gTLD application, or are you trying to crowdfund? Unclear to me.

The fee will fall on us to pay and the gTLD application window is open and our application is in progress. Yes we are crowdfunding (there is a donation link on our website and in the pamphlet) while also actively seeking partners to sponsor us.

If anybody is asking you "are you trying to crowdfund" and your answer is "yes,", you've clearly failed at conversion, marketing and UX design.

90+% of people who would be willing to sponsor this stuff will go "hmm, I wonder where they've taken their money from, not us I guess." Not everybody reads comments, even fewer post ones of their own.

Being on the front of HN is a great opportunity, I'm afraid you haven't used yours as well as you possibly could.

It's usually the clever cunts that try to deceive the investor by deploying an arsenal of marketing tactics. At least the organization in this case, is clear upfront.

That's definitely not a cartel then.

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