What you are actually buying
A .com is a contract, not a purchase. Verisign operates the registry under an agreement with ICANN; we are the registrar of record; you are the registrant, and you hold the right to use the name for as long as you keep renewing it. Nobody at any level of that chain owns it outright, which is why the renewal date is the only part of this that really matters.
Because .com is an ICANN-contracted gTLD, it runs the standard consensus policies rather than rules invented by the registry. That is mostly good news — the transfer process, the dispute process and the expiry sequence are the same everywhere and are published — but it does mean two specific rules bite regularly and neither is obvious.
The two rules that surprise people
The first is the transfer lock. A .com cannot be transferred to a different registrar for 60 days after it is registered, or for 60 days after a previous transfer. If you are consolidating domains with us as part of a migration, register nothing new at the old registrar first, and give the lock room in the plan.
The second is what happens after expiry, which is not one event but a sequence. The registrar may offer an auto-renew grace period of up to 45 days during which a simple renewal still works. Then the name is deleted into a 30-day Redemption Grace Period: DNS stops resolving — your site and your email go down — but only you can recover it, at the restore price rather than the renewal price. Then five days of pending delete, and then it is public. The restore price shown above is deliberately on the same screen as the renewal price so the gap between them is visible before you need it.
Renewal pricing, honestly
Registration, renewal, transfer and restore are all shown live above, from the same pricing engine that will charge your cart. There is no first-year promotional price here that quietly becomes something else in year two, because we would rather have a customer in five years than a conversion this week.
The wholesale price Verisign may charge is capped by its registry agreement with ICANN, dated 1 December 2024, and that ceiling may only be raised in some years of the contract rather than in all of them. Where our price moves, it moves because the ceiling did, and the .net page sets out how the two Verisign contracts differ on this point. Transferring a .com to us adds a year to the registration term rather than resetting it, so a transfer is rarely a wasted payment.