@semitones Heya, thank you for asking! The 30 per year are just an approximation but they're based on multiple factors: how much we need as a margin, how much wholesalers are willing to pay us and average gTLD domain prices as reference. The real price may differ, but we expect a 30 per year ballpark. All I'm saying is, take the following with a little grain of salt.

Essentially, we expect to only see 2/3 of the money, because wholesalers take a cut for their services. We, for now, won't be able to run our own registry services, that would cost even more to set-up. It's a long-term goal to pull that in-house which, at some point would scale in a way that things get cheaper. But we're just starting out.

From those 2/3 we also need to fund our own running costs which is... surprisingly much too. And then we want to support community causes too!

The reason why other domains are much cheaper are economics of scale and essentially subsidies. ccTLDs are often state-run, old gTLDs have so many customers that they can pull registry services in house. And for them it pays off to automate things (costly, but fixed prices) rather than do some things manually (less upfront cost, but higher running cost). Unfortunately, economics of scale are currently tipped against us, but that's the long and short of it, and it's unlikely that we can get lower. 10$ is already what the wholesaler is charging...

But(!) people have already been discussing buying TLDs such as `goes.meow` to offer 3rd level domains to others. This can be a cheap (or even free) option and we wholly support such plans. By ICANN rules we're unfortunately unable to ourselves provide such services.

I hope that clears up some of the pricing! When the prices are fixed, we can be even more transparent/explicit about how they came to be.