Cheap Domains for Indie Hackers: Why I Moved to Porkbun
I switched my domains from GoDaddy to Porkbun and cut my yearly bill in half. Here's how the transfer works and what to watch out for with DNS records.
This year I challenged myself to build random stuff I find interesting every two months or so, and it wasn’t until I had to buy another domain besides my personal one (matiassalles99.codes) that I realized how different domain registrars actually are. I bought my first one at GoDaddy because it was just 10 bucks for the first year, but as soon as the renewal hit, it was around 102 bucks per year.
Since I don’t expect to make any money out of the projects I’m building, I started looking for cheaper alternatives, and after a while I found Porkbun. The same domain GoDaddy charged me 102 bucks for, Porkbun offered for 49. That’s basically a 50% discount just for switching registrars.
Trying it out on a side project
The first thing I did was buy a new domain for my next project (which I’ll publish in the next few days), slaplinks.app, with Porkbun to test it out. If you try it out you’ll find that the UI is pretty straight forward, it might look a little bit raw at first, but it gives you everything you need to manage your domains without clicking through 10 different pages full of upsells.
WHOIS privacy is free by default, and all of those “perks” GoDaddy markets as unique are really not.
Transferring my main domain
After using it for a while I decided to also move my main domain (matiassalles99.codes) to Porkbun. I wasn’t sure what the process would even look like, my first thought was that I had to wait until GoDaddy’s domain expired and then buy it from Porkbun, but then I read about domain transfers.
Turns out it’s pretty simple:
- Remove the domain lock from your current registrar.
- Start the transfer process and grab the auth code your current registrar gives you (GoDaddy in my case).
- Paste that code into Porkbun’s “Transfer” section.
- Either wait for the transfer to complete on its own, or speed it up by confirming the transfer from your old registrar.
One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll have to pay the renewal when transferring your domain. The good news is that you’ll get an extra year added to your domain expiration date, so you don’t lose any time on it.
What about DNS records?
Do you lose any of your DNS records? Yes, (or at least I did 😂). But it’s not a big deal.
You can just copy all of the DNS records from your old registrar’s dashboard, paste them into any AI tool, and ask it to give you back a clean formatted list of every record (type, name, value, TTL). Then you go to Porkbun’s DNS section and add them one by one, or in some cases just import them in bulk.
It took me maybe 15 minutes for my main domain. If you have a setup with a ton of subdomains, mail records, and verification TXTs, it might take a little bit longer, but it’s still pretty straightforward.
The actual numbers I paid
Just so you can see the real numbers, here’s what the same .codes domain looked like for me before and after the move (prices change all the time, so take this as a snapshot of my own experience):
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GoDaddy renewal: ~$102/year
Porkbun renewal: ~$49/year
I also looked at Cloudflare Registrar, which is even cheaper because they sell at cost with no markup, but you can only get domains in there by transferring (and you need to be a Cloudflare customer). I might end up parking some domains there in the future, but for now Porkbun is the best balance for me between price and just being able to buy and manage everything from one dashboard.
Was it worth it?
After a couple of months, I can say I’m really happy with Porkbun. Given that I was paying 102 bucks per year for one domain, I now have 53 bucks a year to spend on other random side projects without spending more overall.
This pairs really well with what I wrote about in Save Money on Heroku: Share One Database Across Multiple Apps. Between cheaper domains and a single shared Postgres for all my staging apps, my “indie infra” budget is genuinely tiny now, which means I can keep building little projects without thinking too hard about whether each one is worth the monthly cost.
If you’re looking for a cheap domain registrar, I really recommend giving Porkbun a try, it’s easy to use and it adds up fast if you plan on owning multiple domains for your projects.
Bonus: what about email hosting?
Now, what about email hosting? That’s a topic for another post, but I’ll tease it by saying that you can use Zoho’s free email hosting with your own custom domain for $0 and it actually works really well. That’s what I use for hello@matiassalles99.codes 😎
If you end up moving registrars or already use Porkbun for your projects, let me know how it went for you!