The title is a bit clickbaity. The thing most people associate Gandi with, domain name registration, is going up 25-50%. The 1000% is this:

> Now, Gandi will raise the prices of the Standard mailbox plan from €0.35/month to €3.99/month per mailbox, a 1040% increase.

Gandi was bought out earlier this year leading to discontinuation of free mailboxes [0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777

> Now, Gandi will raise the prices of the Standard mailbox plan from €0.35/month to €3.99/month per mailbox, a 1040% increase.

This headline reads as if the company is just destroying customer wallets a La Reddit API customers until you get into the details. There are premium email clients that charge way more than EUR3.99 per month.

And I'd migrated almost all my domains from Network Solutions to Gandi, after NS was bought by those guys in Florida. Who's left that's good?

An appeal of Gandi is that they do not take the position that they own domains, and the registrant just rents them. Gandi used to be clearer on this. 2004 terms: "The Client owns the Domain Name registered. Gandi simply acts on the Client's behalf."[1]

That page disappeared some time prior to 2008.

Here are the terms from 2015. "You are the owner of the domain name, meaning that You are the person or the legal representative of a legal entity that has been declared as the owner of a domain name upon its registration, and visible in the public Whois database,...)."[2]

Wordier, but not too bad.

In the current version, that explicit ownership language has disappeared. There's a definition of terms that says: "Contact Owner: refers to the natural or legal person identified by the Registry as the owner of the domain name."[3] But no explicit statement of ownership. The termination clause allows Gandi to terminate only for breach of contract, not at will.

Compare Network Solutions, which is part of "Web.com":

"Registrant acknowledges and agrees that Web.com has the absolute right and power, in its sole discretion and without any liability to Registrant whatsoever, to suspend the Services, close Registrant's account, terminate provisioning of the Services, list Registrant's personal information in the WHOIS output or unmask or otherwise provide the Registrant's personal information to a claimant or other party to resolve any and all third party claims, whether threatened or made, arising out of Registrant's use of the Domain Name or the Services, or to take any other action which Web.com deems necessary, in the event that (i) the Domain Name is alleged to violate or infringe a third party's trademark, trade name, copyright interests or other legal rights of third parties; (ii) Registrant breaches any provision of this Agreement; (iii) Registrant breaches any provision of the Registrar Terms; (d) if necessary to protect the integrity and stability of the applicable Domain Name registry; (e) if necessary to comply with any applicable laws, government rules or requirements, subpoenas, court orders or requests of law enforcement; (f) if Web.com is named as a defendant in, or investigated in anticipation of, any legal or administrative proceeding arising out of Registrant's use of the Services or Domain Name; (g) if necessary to comply with ICANN's Dispute Resolution Policy or other policies promulgated by ICANN (including policies which may preclude using a service such as Private Domain Registration); (h) if necessary to avoid any financial loss or legal liability (civil or criminal) on the part of Web.com, its parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, shareholders, agents, officers, directors and employees; or (i) any violation of the Web.com Acceptable Use Policy."[4]

Um.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20041206084659/http://gandi.net/...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20141203012738/http://www.gandi....

[3] https://contract.gandi.net/v5/contracts/53904/DomainNameCond...

[4] https://assets.web.com/legal/English/DomainNameRegistrationS...

If they have to raise prices to... $5/mo, to me that sounds like a part of their " no bs" policy.

To me, 35c/mo doesn't exactly sound like a service I should be trusting with something like emails. $5/mo won't exactly break the bank either.

I used to really like Gandi. I still have a t-shirt with their #no_bullshit slogan that's from 2015-16. It's been a couple of years since I stopped having any need for their services, and its sad to see them dropping the ball like this.

Was only a matter of time after Gandi was sold off.

It made me migrate all of my emails to a self-hosted solution using Mail-in-a-box. I'm also looking for another registrar that handles .me and .ru domains without going through Cloudflare.

So far no luck. So my domains will cost me a little more to renew next time it comes time to renew them.

I just completed my email migration away from Gandi this weekend. I figured if I had to really start paying for it, I might as well get something better than their offering or move to something cheaper. If I'm paying ~$4/mo per user, it really starts to seem worth it to spring to something that offers a lot more for similar pricing. Then there's lots of services out there which offer cheaper prices with more features. For truly just a basic mailbox <$1/account can make some sense, but basic email only for that price is crazy steep.

I ended up migrating to Zoho. It took about an hour getting accounts set up, DNS records changed, and data migrated. Importing data through IMAP went really smoothly. I probably could have gotten by on the free tier but a few family users didn't want to use the apps and preferred the Exchange ActiveSync functionality to have a more system-native experience on platforms like Android and Windows.

So far, so good.

It’s 2023 and I still see lots of comments in this thread asking things “who is still good”, “who hasn’t sold out yet”, etc. etc.

How many more years need to go by before we all acknowledge the truth? We are not guaranteed fixed pricing and we do not “own” anything in this environment. Legal terms and marketing “guarantees” are all as malleable as the code that backs the product. This is a fundamental reality of working on the web. Every time I see someone angrily copy and paste a company quote of some kind, I chuckle a little because that’s someone who still believes that companies all mean what they say all the time.

Companies mean what they say today to make money today, that’s it. As soon as today’s messaging no longer satisfies the profit motive, everything changes. The most successful companies are the ones that are able to raise prices without upsetting people’s expectations.

I've been a Gandi customer for over a decade. I'm willing to shell out the $4/month (for now) I get it, they have to make money. But when the aliases are no longer free: I'm out.

Having a backup plan isn't a horrible idea either... might give mail-in-a-box a try.

I'm glad I jumped ship when they got bought out by a shady company with a history of price gouging.

I like porkbun for personal stuff, dnsimple for work

Click bait title.

1000% when the real story is an increase of 3 euro?

Bs, the company decided they can't discount and as long as they give enough notice I don't see a problem.

> Now, Gandi will raise the prices of the Standard mailbox plan from €0.35/month to €3.99/month per mailbox, a 1040% increase. The Premium plan will go from €1.75/month to €5.99/month, a 242% increase.

I left Gandi a year or so ago with the couple of domains that I had there, since they had a decent markup over cloudflare’s wholesale pricing.

Was easier than expected to port my config — I was especially nervous about the nameserver config since I use one of those domains for my primary email address everywhere. But yeah totally smooth, there is almost zero friction to change domain registrars… I’m surprised that companies can mark up on pricing at all without their margins getting entirely competed away to nearly zero

I've used Gandi for ~15 years. I don't care about their VPSes, email boxes, web hosting, or anything else. All I cared about was the privacy, anonymity, and integrity of their domain registrar service with sensible prices. Now that they appear to have completely sold out to corporate interests and are on the price-price-profit spiral train, I'm wondering what alternatives exist.

This is why I switched all my $dayjob domains to Hover years ago. They charge 15-50USD/year depending on the TLD and its fees. No bullshit, no ads, no cross-sell, friendly Canadian support.

You get what you pay for. I want my registrar to have a sustainable business model so they don’t screw me over. A domain name is a critical SPOF for any business.

Curious if this will impact AWS pricing, as I believe Gandi is one of the main providers behind Route 53.

Always use https://tld-list.com to find the registrar with the cheapest renewal rate.

Whats a good alternative now, I have a few domains with them..