ICANN Accreditation Cost Calculations

A lot of Domain and Hosting companies getting confused over feasibility for getting ICANN Accreditation. Few General questions comes in mind ::

1. Becoming ICANN Accredited Registrar saves your money ?
2. How much does it cost to run an ICANN Registrar?
3. If ICANN Accreditation is feasible for no. of domains we manage ?

Here I am trying to summarize the actual cost of maintaining an ICANN accredited registrar.

For Smaller Domain portfolio holders, becoming ICANN Accredited registrar initially may increase the cost but other advantage of becoming registrar should be taken into consideration e.g. Brand Mileage,  Better control over domains, access to expired domain monetization and capacity to acquire popular expired domain under your management. The cons includes Registrar need to maintain balance with different registries separately for every TLD, Legal compliance matter directly comes to registrar and ICANN Contractual obligations.

Initial Cost for ICANN Accreditation ::
1. 3500 USD Application Fees ( Non refundable )
2. 70000 USD Working Capital ( Though this amount need to be shown in your a/c books )

On-going Cost ::
1. ICANN Annual fees of 4000 USD
2. ICANN Quarterly Variable fees in range of 400 – 2000 USD per quarter. This is based on No. of Domains under Registrar and usage of Batch pool connections.
3. ICANN Per Domain Fees of 0.18 USD per domain per year
4. Domain cost as per TLD, e.g. .COM @ 8.39 USD
5. General Commercial liability Insurance of 500K USD, approx. cost range between 500 USD – 1000 USD per year

Other Expense ::
1. Registrar System per Domain Cost, If you are hiring an external company ( e.g. LogicBoxes ) for Domain Management System, they charge you between 0.20 USD – 1 USD per domain per year based on your domain volumes.
2. Registrar System other costs, which Includes but not limited to charges for submitting and maintaining your domain data to ICANN under contractual obligations, handling different compliance issue. These charges may be in range of 1000 USD – 10000  USD per year.
3. Other miscellaneous expense at registrar’s end for running and maintaining Registrar Operations.

Below Calculator Gives you idea of estimated cost per domain being ICANN Accredited Registrar ::

Based on Calculator above, we can say that you need approx. 50000 Domain names for break even in terms of Domain Cost.