I wanted to title this article, “How to buy a domain with Bitcoin for less than $3”. However, I feel it is important to tell a practical story. The domain monierate.com is a practical story.
In the last post, I shared how we came up with the domain. Well, one interesting thing I didn’t mention was how we purchased the domain with Bitcoin for less than $3.
Come with me.
Necessity is the mother of discovery
As a team, our approach is to build a simple tool that will require very little capital to run. So every decision has to be based on a tight budget.
Choosing a name
I already explained how we came up with the name Monierate in the last post, and how the goal was to get a .COM TLD. The problem was, .COM domains cost $8 - $20 on the internet.
Is there a way I can get it for free?
Finding the cheapest registrar
I have purchased most of my domains on Namecheap. But this time, I was thinking about the price. A .COM domain on Namecheap cost about $10 for existing customers.
$10 is fair, but on a budget mindset, you ask yourself, “Can I get it free or cheap?”
So I googled “Cheapest .COM domain registrars”.
From the search result, I discovered a tool called tld-list.com. Tld-list is a domain price comparison tool, similar to Monierate.com but for domain prices.
On the tld-list page, I found a list of registrars for .COM domains with their prices displayed alongside other information like payment options and coupon codes.
The first(lowest) price on the list was $2.89 from a registrar called Spaceship and they accept Bitcoin.
If you are based in Nigeria, you know how terrible and expensive it is to pay with a bank card. Nigerian cards are frequently rejected by international payment processors. As a Bitcoin native, seeing that Bitcoin is accepted on Spaceship made the purchase process stress-free.
Paying with Bitcoin
I immediately hop on to the Spaceship website by clicking the link on the tld-list page. Added monierate.com to my cart, pasted the coupon code which I copied from the TDLR-LIST website, and proceeded.
I was asked to choose a payment method, I selected Account Fund. Funded the Account Fund with Bitcoin from my Muun App. And in less than 60 seconds, the purchase of Monierate.com was successful.
Spaceship has an account wallet that you can fund with Bitcoin, you can they use the funds on your wallet to pay for domains.
The total amount paid was $2.98 including Bitcoin Lightning fees (1 SAT) 😅…surreal.
If I had used a virtual card to purchase the domain, it should have been more than that.
Conclusion
So many things we pay for are not necessary, even the necessary ones like hosting and domains, we can save 50% of the original amount by being a little frugal and doing some Google search.
I used to pay $20 for a Cron Job service, but last year, I discovered a free Cron Job tool and funny enough it works better than the $20 tool I was using.
Next time you want to buy a domain, go to tld-list.com and compare prices. I suggest you look for a registrar that accepts Bitcoin as paying with Bitcoin is cheaper than cards.
I pray we all make it.