Cloudflare launches a low-cost domain registrar

It’s been a busy week at Cloudflare, which promised a week of news for its birthday (and delivered). After announcing the Bandwidth Alliance yesterday, the company today announced the Cloudflare Registrar. This new domain registration service promises to only charge the wholesale price that the top-level domain registry (think Verisign) charges. Typically, registrars charge their own fees on top of that and try to upsell you to a hosting plan or other services that you likely don’t need.

As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, this new service isn’t meant to be a loss-leader. “We took a look at this and said: every single Cloudflare customer needs to register their domains,” he told me. “And I’ve never heard somebody say: I love my domain registrar. We hope to create the first domain registrar people love.”

The service will start rolling out by order of how long a customer has been with Cloudflare. If you signed up when Cloudflare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt eight years ago, you’ll get yours pretty soon. But Cloudflare also allows you to donate to Girls Who Code to skip the line. “What we’re hoping is that whatever [our customers save], they will donate to Girls Who Code.”

Given Cloudflare’s heritage, it’s no surprise the new service will offer security features like built-in two-factor authentication and automatic domain lock, as well as Whois privacy protection.

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s likely because you’ve heard of the Cloudflare enterprise registrar, the company’s domain registration and protection service for large businesses.