What .io, .ai, .tv and .me really cost

Price is the first surprise

At a Polish registrar, keeping .io costs about six times what .pl costs per year, and .tv more than twice as much. Five years on a single .io address runs to roughly the price of a decent laptop.

That is affordable for a funded company and a real consideration for a side project — especially because the invoice returns every year whether the project worked out or not.

These registries live on it

For a small territory such an extension can be a meaningful budget item. Tuvalu with .tv and Anguilla with .ai are the examples everyone cites: two letters assigned decades ago by IANA turned into an export product.

There is an upside for you. A registry funded this way has every reason to keep the service running smoothly.

The risk worth understanding before you commit

A country-code extension belongs to a territory, and the status of territories is a political matter. A change of operator, price list or policy needs no approval beyond the registry itself. There is no equivalent of the shared ICANN rules that protect .com holders.

Availability checking is weaker too. Neither .io, nor .co, nor .me publishes RDAP, so a free result there is an inference rather than a fact. .ai and .tv are the exceptions — both do publish it.

Dispute procedures differ as well. What you know about recovering a .com name will not necessarily apply.

When it is still the right call

When the name is short, memorable and reads correctly for your industry, and you understand what you are signing up for. At that point the fee is a marketing cost and should be budgeted as one.

When you simply need an address for a business that serves one country, the same name in that country extension will be cheaper to keep and more familiar to your customers.