Just received notification from Afilias of a price reduction for the .au wholesale price to be effective from 1 June 2022.
Registrars,
Afilias is pleased to inform you of the following updates to wholesale pricing for new registration, renewal, change Of Registrant and .au Direct application fee transactions of .au second and sub-zone levels effective 1 June 2022.
Existing wholesale price for .au domain names: $7.88 + GST
Updated wholesale price effective 1 June 2022 at 00:00 UTC: $7.83 + GST
The updated pricing has already been made available in the OT&E environment as of 20 April 2022 for registrars to test transactions.
There is no change to the registry lock service fee and it remains the same as $10 per domain per month.
If you have any questions, please contact .au Technical Support.
Sincerely,
.au Technical Support
This is a $0.05 price reduction, which begs to ask how was this worked out?
Based on auDA financial reports that shows a substantial surplus being made each year, I wonder why the reduction in price was decided to 5 Cents and more?
To give perspective, 3.5 Million domains under management with a $0.05 price drop is $175,000 net reduction for auDA. I would assume that Afilias share is not affected by this as that would require a new contract if it was not stipulated in the existing one.
Will Registrars even bother to pass this $0.05 on to end users? it is a small amount and the work to update backend pricing, financial reports, system alerts, is a time and costly exercise for Registrars. I would assume that many will not, and instead will use take the reduction to cover their costs that this creates.
I can however confirm that Drop will pass this saving on, as any saving is still a saving for Domain investors clients.
Any cost reduction is great, but why only $0.05 per domain when auDA reported financials are simply amazing…
The result for the year ended 30 June 2021 is a profit of $10,901,331
a huge increase from 2020 profit of $2,395,187
If you have over $48 million in assets in cash and investments with a yearly profit of $10.9 million, and expect to have a bigger profit next financial year with the launch of .au, I am some what baffled why it was decided to sacrifice $175,000 when it only amounts to 1.6% of just the profit value or 0.36% of auDA assets.
Surely Australian consumers deserve a better price reduction.
If auDA ever decide to go public, definitely buy shares!!! (Note this is not financial advice and Domainer is not qualified to give financial advice)
Confirmation received that this price reduction was built into the Afilias agreement in the event that domains under management surpassed 3,500,000 domain name under management.
So this $0.05 is coming out of Afilias share of the registration cost… I wonder if auDA considered matching this or is planning to offer a price reduction from their share, considering that the revenues are much higher now than ever before.