Is $227,000 the magic number?

Have years of speculation, debate and discussion on the cost of a new Top-Level Domain finally been put to bed with the announcement this week of a $227,000 price tag per application? Yes! And not quite.  As with most decisions on the detail of the second gTLD application round, it’s not always as straight forward as it seems.

The positive news is that ICANN continues to be committed to the application window opening in April 2026.  In June this year a price range of between $208,000 and $293,000 per application was aired, with further work required on the cost recovery model to firm up a more precise figure.  That work appears to have now been completed and in a surprise announcement, following on from the ICANN board’s meeting earlier the month in Los Angeles, a figure of $227,000 was announced on the 25^th of September as the TLD application and evaluation fee for the next round.

In a blog written by ICANN’s New gTLD Lead Marika Konings, she said that “While the fee will not be approved formally until the Board approves the Applicant Guidebook for the next round, the expected cost is a critical piece of information for potential applicants when considering whether to submit a new gTLD application.”

There are still a couple of outstanding implementation items that ICANN continues to work through, including adoption of advice on Name Collisions and Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), but these are not seen as show-stoppers for the current timeline.  It is anticipated that the finalised Applicant Guidebook (AGB) will be published in mid-2025 for public comment, at which point all of the remaining issues will have been worked through.

Whilst the price tag represents a $42,000, or 23% increase from the last application round, when accounting for inflation since 2012 (37% according to US Government CPI data), the application fee has increased significantly less than the rate of inflation.

Importantly for brand holders that are considering an application(s), the $227,000 price tag does not include fees for conditional evaluations, which includes the assessment to qualify for dotBrand status.  It’s unlikely this additional fee will be excessive – our estimation is around $8,000 per TLD – but we need to wait for this to be confirmed in the finalised AGB in 2025.  However, this is a major milestone on the path towards the next application round.

For potential applicants, being able to understand the value they can gain from an application is as important as the cost.  That value may come in the form of a return on investment in terms of new clients, greater geographical reach, or better market positioning, or it may be through cost reduction in terms of simplifying and creating a more secure infrastructure by using a dotBrand to host an abuse-free ecosystem.  That return on investment work can now start in earnest with knowledge of the application fee and ongoing operational costs understood.

For organisations considering dotBrand applications this is a positive step forward and will allow them to start pulling together their budgets.  There’s no indication of when any subsequent rounds beyond 2026 will occur, so the opportunity is in the here and now for anyone looking to have their own slice of digital infrastructure.

Naturally, there are still some unknowns, but that shouldn’t be a barrier to starting the internal preparation work for a successful dotBrand TLD application.  The sooner this part of the process starts, the greater the value of the overall project can be.  With just 18 months until the application round opens, many companies have already started their preparation for their applications, creating their internal stakeholder teams and conducting feasibility studies on their chosen strings.