Read This Before Buying a Domain from Cloudflare
If you don’t have a personal domain in 2025, you are NGMI. When you deploy your portfolio / personal project on a personalized domain, it sends a strong public signal - that this person is not kidding. Due to the increased demand, there are a lot of domain name registrars in the market today. One of them is cloudflare - the company that took down half of global internet on 18th November 2025. Why would a security / request proxying service provider enter the business of selling domains? Let’s find out.
Benefits of Buying from Cloudflare
There are a couple of benefits of buying a domain directly from cloudflare.
Zero markup
They don’t charge any premium on the domains. Cloudflare charges exactly what they have to pay to the registry - without adding their own margins. They don’t intend to profit directly from selling domains. The price difference is significant if you compare annual renewals. Many other domain registrar have a discounted first year plan but charge a renewal premium from year 2 and 3. So, if you are planning to keep the domain for a long time, buying it from cloudflare may be worth it.
Cloudflare Coverage from Day One
All your hosted content on the domain will have the required cloudflare provided requests reverse proxying [orange cloud], edge level caching. The dashboard to update DNS records is also very clean and simple to use. I like the web traffic analysis feature of cloudflare as well. We can access geographical distribution of all the incoming traffic without adding a single line of code in our website. Above mentioned features has limited availability on free tier on cloudflare but generous enough to get one started.
Disadvantages of Buying from Cloudflare
Before making the final purchase, here are some important points that you should read regarding buying a domain from cloudflare.
Nameservers Lock-In
When you purchase a domain, you get something called nameservers. They are used to manage your domain’s DNS records. Normally, you have an option to update these records and transfer your domain management to any other service provider by pointing to their nameservers. This allows you to manage DNS records with your desired service provider. Unfortunately, this is not supported for domains bought from cloudflare. They enforce this to keep you locked in to their platform. This can also be one of the reasons, why they don’t charge markup fees during domain registration, hoping to profit from you in their other offerings. You can however transfer your domain to another registrar - which requires to buy additional 1 year renewal, defeating the whole edge of cloudflare’s “no-margin” renewals.
Lack of Transparency in Upfront Payment
This might be a personal opinion but I felt the entire process of buying the domain was not fully transparent. On the dashboard upto the final payment gateway page, it showed me a price exclusive on taxes. After executing the transaction, by bank account got charged with an added tax. This amount breakup was only visible in the final tax invoice received post payment. Ideally it should have been displayed upfront to make a better choice. In my case the tax was around 18%, hence hits hard if you are on tight budgets.
No Local Currency Support
On the dashboard, all the prices shown are in US dollars. If you are buying from India with a debit card - your card gets charged in INR. The exchange rate that is taken into account is something I am unable to understand. Even after looking at my end-of-month account slips - I could not understand the exact exchange rate that was used while charging my card. This was also the first time I have bought something in dollars with my Indian debit card, so I maybe lacking proper knowledge on how to access this information. But again, in comparison, buying a domain from a provider that has a base in india [GoDaddy], the payment process is seamless. So, it can be a bit of a situation to deal with for some users.
How to Buy a Domain from Cloudflare
Step 1: Login into Cloudflare Dashboard
Step 2: Go to domains page using the side menu
Step 3: Click on “Buy a domain” button and search for your desired domain
Step 4: After finalizing the domain, proceed with checkout. You need to enter some personal information for completing the purchase
Step 5: KaChing! the domain is now yours.
[Tip: keep auto renewals off to prevent any unwanted charges for your forgotten domains.]
Final Verdict
Should you buy a domain from cloudflare? Yes, go with it.. if looking for multi-year ownership. Incase you are looking to buy a domain for less than a year, then don’t forget to search for deals at other registrars like GoDaddy and NameCheap - you may be able to find a better deal. This was me sharing my experience of buying a domain from cloudflare. I hope it helps you make a informed decision. Incase you have any insights to share regarding the currency exchange charge - do let me know. Thanks for reading!
