It’s an addictive drug. Like Dennis Leary said, you could name them Death and make the packaging black with a skull and crossbones and people would buy two at a time.

Yeah, depends. Sometimes they’ll run a deal to multi-year registration as like a bill discount. Seems more rare these days. I look up a good renewal rate on www.tld-list.com and then have to actually go to the registrar and make up a fictional name and then see if it even allows registration for more than a year and what the cost is for 10 years.

As others mentioned, Verisign administers the .com space and they’re raising prices. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more-expensive-00023524

I do like to keep track of the budget gTLD renewal prices at tld-list.com and use that for my personal use. I have an offbeat domain I registered for 10 years for something like $25 a few years ago.