The Renewal Trap: What Builders Advertise vs What the Renewal Bill Says

The play, explained

The advertised price gets you in; the renewal price is the business model. It is legal, it is disclosed in fine print, and it is engineered around the one fact every platform knows: by renewal time, moving your site feels harder than paying.

July 2026 examples from our files

• IONOS: the famous $1 per month first year; renewal at standard rates several multiples higher.
• GoDaddy: low teaser entry, with renewal jumps that routinely double the monthly cost.
• Hostinger: the headline price requires a 48 month prepay; the true monthly cost at renewal, on shorter terms, is a different number entirely.
• Domain registrars generally: year one is a loss leader; the registrar bets on your inertia forever after.

Defense is simple and boring: calendar every renewal date the day you sign up, price the exit before the teaser expires, and prefer platforms whose advertised price IS the price. Our own pricing (here, flat $29 and $99) is public precisely because we track everyone else's fine print for a living, and we would not survive having any of our own.

About Builder Watch

Builder Watch tracks the pricing pages and health of 47 website builders every day, keeps timestamped receipts, and reports only changes we can prove. It is run by Marketing By Magnet, which also builds PISCES, an AI website builder, so you know exactly where we stand: we compete with some of the companies we cover, and we publish the receipts so you never have to take our word for anything.