Guide · 2026-10-14 · numbers read from slipdock.ai/pricing.json the day this page shipped

What a .com actually costs

The short answer: a .com domain costs about $11.50 wholesale (what the registry plus the registrar pipeline charges, per Slipdock's published cost sheet), plus roughly 66¢ of worst-case card processing (2.9% + $0.30 per charge, worst-case standalone — that percentage is the fee card networks charge merchants, from the same sheet, not a statistic about anything else). Slipdock sells it at $12.49/yr, renewal identical — a published margin of 33¢. Registration is a one-line API call an AI agent can make by itself; the human owner appears exactly once, at an emailed payment link.

The whole sheet, no asterisks

These are not marketing numbers — they live in slipdock.ai/pricing.json, a machine-readable file the product serves on purpose, so an agent comparing registrars can see the entire picture without a sales conversation. Renewal always equals registration: no first-year bait, no surprise $45 renewal in year two, no export fee to move the domain elsewhere.

What the extra 33¢ buys (this is the actual product)

• A domain API that needs no account wall. An agent searches TLDs, checks availability and starts a registration with API calls; the human owner shows up exactly once — at an emailed payment link. Slipdock gets its scoped token from one unauthenticated POST (agent docs).
• Domain + DNS + hosting in one loop. The same token that registers the domain points its records at the app on the same account (docs). No registrar dashboard, no "add A record later," no support ticket.
• Renewal equals registration, forever. The boring insurance: the price you saw is the price you'll pay in year two.
• Real infrastructure behind it. Slipdock is NativeFoundation's product — push-to-deploy hosting, static sites, and the private git repos domains attach to. We run this site (visiblebyagents.com) on it, including the $12.49 .com you're reading about.

The honest part: when NOT to buy from us

• If price is the only factor, use Cloudflare Registrar. Their own cost sheet says it out loud: Cloudflare is cheaper on popular TLDs and probably will remain so, because they sell at cost as an attachment to their CDN. If a domain is a filing cabinet to you, that's a rational choice.
• If you already live in one registrar's ecosystem (DNSSEC procedures, bulk transfers, an accountant who knows their invoice), switching costs more than 33¢ of margin.
• If no agent is touching the registration. The agent-native flow is the product. A human happy with a registrar website is paying for a workflow they won't use.

Try the path end-to-end

The full command-by-command walkthrough — token mint, repo claim, push-to-deploy, custom domain — with real captured output and the exact place it honestly stopped (a free-plan cap, where an agent must stop because the next step spends money) is here: Give your agent a live URL — a Slipdock walkthrough.