How to Get a Free Domain Name (And What It Really Costs)
In early 2024 roughly 12.6 million free domains stopped resolving at once. Their owners had done nothing wrong. Here is what free domains really are, the legitimate ways to get one at no cost, and when free is genuinely fine.
September 9, 20265 min readFree domains · Registrars · Risk
The short answer. Genuinely free domains come with a landlord who can evict you without notice, and it has already happened at enormous scale. Free subdomains are fine for testing. A real domain costs about the same as two coffees a year, and it is yours.
Search for a free domain and you get pages of results promising a name at no cost. Most are one of three things: a subdomain, a bundled first year that renews expensively, or a registry that can take the name back whenever it likes.
Here is what each actually is, and what happened the last time millions of people trusted the third one.
The thing that should end the debate
Freenom gave away domains on .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf and .gq for years. It was the largest source of free domains on the internet, and for a long time it worked.
Then in March 2023, Meta sued Freenom in a California court, alleging cybersquatting and trademark infringement, and citing phishing campaigns run against Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users from those extensions. Freenom halted new registrations almost immediately and exited the domain business the following year.
By early 2024, roughly 12.6 million domains across those extensions had simply stopped resolving. Around 99 percent of what Freenom managed went dark. Every site, every email address, every link anyone had ever shared.
The scale is hard to overstate. Cloudflare alone lost around 22 percent of the domains on its platform in the fallout. Not because those users did anything wrong, and not because they failed to renew. The landlord left.
Freenom returned in July 2026 selling .tk, .cf and .gq from about 8.22 euros a year. The free era is over, and the people who built on it did not get their names back.
Why free domains attract abuse
This is not bad luck. It is structural.
A domain that costs nothing costs a spammer nothing either. When a name is free, registering ten thousand of them for a phishing campaign is a rounding error, and there is no payment trail to follow.
Freenom's extensions made up five of the ten most abused top-level domains by phishers.
The consequence lands on legitimate users. Spam filters, browser warnings and corporate firewalls all learn which extensions tend to carry attacks, and they start applying that judgement to everything from the same neighbourhood. Your entirely honest newsletter gets filtered because of the company your extension keeps.
The three things sold as "free"
1. Free subdomains
Platforms give you something like yourname.vercel.app or yourname.github.io at no cost.
These are genuinely free and genuinely useful. Nothing is being hidden. But you do not control the name, you cannot take it with you, and every link points at someone else's brand. Perfect for a prototype, wrong for anything you want to keep.
2. Free first year, bundled with hosting
The most common offer. Buy a hosting plan, get a domain free for twelve months.
The domain is real and it is yours. The catch is the renewal, which is frequently well above market, and the fact that leaving the host sometimes means an awkward transfer. Fine if you wanted that hosting anyway. Expensive if the free domain is what sold you.
3. Genuinely free registrations
The Freenom model. No payment, no relationship, no obligation on either side. That last part is the problem: with no contract, you have no standing when the name is reclaimed.
What free actually costs
| What you give up | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Stability | The registry can reclaim the name, and has |
| Email deliverability | Filters distrust the extension by reputation |
| Trust | Visitors and partners read the extension |
| Transferability | Free registries often block transfers out |
| Legal recourse | No payment usually means no contract |
| Search presence | Losing the domain loses everything you built |
That last line is the one that hurts. Rankings, backlinks and citations attach to a domain. Lose the name and you restart from zero, no matter how good the content was.
The legitimate free options that do exist
Not everything free is a trap. These are real.
Platform subdomains. GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages. Excellent for projects, documentation and demos.
Student and nonprofit programmes. Some registrars and developer programmes give students a free year on a real extension. These are ordinary registrations with someone else paying, which is the important difference.
Free tiers on services you use. Some platforms include a domain with a paid plan you already wanted. That is a discount, not a free domain, and it is fine as long as you read the renewal.
The test that sorts them. Ask who can take the name away and under what circumstances. If the answer is "a company, at its discretion, for no stated reason", it is not really yours.
When free is genuinely the right call
Being fair to the free option, there are real cases:
- Learning. Building your first site and following a tutorial. Use a subdomain.
- Throwaway prototypes. Something that exists for a week.
- Internal tools nobody outside your team will ever visit.
- Testing a deployment pipeline before the real name is ready.
The rule is simple: if losing the name overnight would be an inconvenience, free is fine. If it would be a disaster, pay.
What paying actually costs
This is the part that reframes the whole question.
| Extension | Realistic yearly renewal |
|---|---|
| .com | about 10 to 16 dollars |
| .org | about 10 to 21 dollars |
| .net | about 11 to 23 dollars |
| .xyz | about 11 to 15 dollars |
A .com at a registrar that prices at cost runs a little over 10 dollars a year. That is under a dollar a month for an asset you control, that no company can reclaim on a whim, and that carries every link you will ever earn.
Weighed against 12.6 million domains going dark in a single event, that is not a close call.
Do watch the renewal rather than the first year, because the gap can be enormous. Some extensions advertise at 2 dollars and renew above 40. We compared the real numbers across extensions, and the multiples are worse than most people expect.
If you are already on a free domain
Move, and move before you have to.
- Register a real domain now, while you can still redirect from the old one.
- Set up redirects from every free URL to its new equivalent.
- Update every link you control: profiles, listings, signatures, documentation.
- Move email off the free domain first, since that failure is the most damaging.
- Keep the redirects running as long as the old name still resolves.
Doing this while the old domain works preserves most of what you built. Doing it after it stops preserves nothing.
Check what is available for the name you are already using, or generate alternatives if the obvious one is gone.
Freenom figures reflect widely reported industry and security research coverage of the 2023 to 2024 shutdown. Pricing is indicative and changes frequently.
Put the research to work.
Check your shortlist across the extensions that matter, then save the strongest names to a project.
Check a domain