Can confirm I opted out of the custom domain today when emailed back with the $75 charge. The cost isn't bad but it rubbed me the wrong way doing the form two months ago and heard nothing back until today. 15 emails/tweets unanswered. Completely understand charging but was turned off by the lack of response/acknowledgement.
Such a shame that a high cost is charged for custom domain handling.
Such a huge price increase.
Originally for free. Yes that wasn't sustainable. But $75??
You can buy a domain for $5pa
Free SSL using LetsEncrypt.
I get Medium are looking for a revenue model, but this is ridiculous.
Why not provide enterprise blogging or something they can charge enterprise for. Take on the Wordpress kingdom and get into big business.
Don't know if I'd pay $75 for custom domain Medium when there are Hugo, Ghost, Pelican and such free great alternatives for static blogs.
But, man do I really wish my work bought something like Medium and replaced the cumbersome Wiki pages. My own Wiki pages are ugly and a pain to manage tables, images and text.
That honestly doesn't feel too bad. $75 is a pretty low price to pay if you care enough about the custom domain and the branding capability that comes with it.
Perhaps they could tier it so that there's a "vanity" tier and a "branding" tier, that way people who really just want the vanity URL can have it for cheaper.
It doesn't make sense to me. The more successful sites will be around longer - so $75/one-time probably means less lifetime value versus the $5/mo you suggested which I think makes more sense. But they probably need more cash sooner.
And $75 one time will just push the masses to alternatives.
