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I registered the domain onlyfans.sexy ~6 years ago as a gag where I'd post pictures of fans (everything on the site and in this post is SFW). This year I got an email stating that, like all prior years, the domain would auto-renew at $38 in seven days and didn't think anything of the next two emails also notifying me that the domain would auto-renew.

It would seem that I very much SHOULD have paid attention to those next two emails, because in both the three and one day renewal emails the price changed from $38 to $3000. Needless to say, I was surprised when I was billed $3k USD (plus tax).

After contacting Hover's customer support, they told me that there was nothing that they could do about this and they have a no refund policy because "Hover does not have the ability to override or reverse pricing set by the registry. Premium domain pricing, including renewal costs, is determined by the registry, and they may adjust those prices over time. Once a renewal has been processed, we are charged that fee immediately by the registry, and those charges are non-refundable to us."

So according to Hover, the .sexy registry (Uniregistry) sets prices as it sees fit, decided to jack up the renewal cost at the last minute because they can, and there's simply nothing they or I can do about it. Has anyone here experienced anything similar?

Comments

rglullis•57m ago

Doesn't seem to be an issue with Hover, here.

shrinks99•55m ago

Arguably yeah! The issue I have seems to mostly be with Uniregistry (aside from the fact that Hover takes a cut of the transaction).

...But I'm also not a Uniregistry customer, I'm a Hover customer. Do I have any recourse with the TLD owner?

ontoillogical•45m ago

I believe this is extremely unexpected behavior for an "auto-renew" feature. If I'm told that I will be autorenwing something in 7 days and am told about a price, that price changing within those 7 days feels like something the consumer should be protected against!

rglullis•37m ago

How?! Hover is just a proxy between the customer and the real TLD owner. It could very well be that the TLD system saw that the domain was about to expire and decided to jack up the price then.

Maybe Hover could've bought the domain themselves when close to the expiration date to secure the lower price, but then if the customer decides to let the domain go it would be they holding out the bag.

ofjcihen•32m ago

Sounds more like the risk is on Hover then and not on the customer. If you advertise 38 dollars to me for a product you source from someone else and that the producer suddenly charges 100x the price you can’t just charge me that price because “that’s the price”.

You’re making money as a middleman, you accept the risk of a middleman.

shrinks99•28m ago

The domain renewal cost in their dashboard is notably right back to $38 too!

ofjcihen•25m ago

Absolutely take a screenshot of this and your prior charges and dispute this with your bank.

wjnc•38m ago

Register a complaint with the creditcard company with proof of last years $38, the auto renew message with price of $38 and the amount they put on your card. Pretty clear and cut? You can’t offer X and then take Y. It’s Hovers problem what the price behind the door is.

Did you read the ToS? The ToS states they renew at prices mentioned on the website. I can find .xyz to renew at $19.99. Now get your screenshots and get your money back. (I’ll correct myself transparantly: this is not very clear from the ToS. Prices are in USD and from time to time they can limit the number of domains at that price. That says little about the price at renewal.)

add-sub-mul-div•16m ago

One entity preys on loneliness, another co-opts the established trademark for its own purpose, a third holds the second's co-opted identity hostage for thousands of dollars. If I'd known this is what the internet would become, 2004 me would have had a kind of career crisis.

lstodd•15m ago

If you think it was any different in 90s you are mistaken.

_vertigo•11m ago

Clutch them pearls

cwnyth•8m ago

> another co-opts the established trademark for its own purpose

That's a funny way of referring to a parody.

joshstrange•15m ago

Thankfully a chargeback is possible here. While a chargeback is almost always "possible" it can be dangerous if the company you are charging-back is the only provider of a service. I'd be wary about doing a chargeback on the Google/Amazon's of the world but Hover? There are many other registrars out there if you are willing to transfer and for $3K I'd be transfering my domains and then filing a chargeback.

BUT, before you do that, threaten a chargeback. That might unstick their support or get your case bumped up the chain. If they still refuse then transfer and chargeback.

behringer•6m ago

Make sure you get all your domains out before the charge back is filed.

dividedcomet•9m ago

As others said I think a chargeback is the way to go. I had a much smaller scale version of this happen where hover wanted to change $70 to renew a domain that Cloudflare would charge $30 for