Oops, I had removed that link temporarily but forgot to push to production. We are working on getting our Knowledge Center and FAQs sections live and once that happens, the link will go back!
We have been using the term "brand new" as a way to show that we're trying to approach the domain industry a bit differently than our 5-10 year old competitors. I think the biggest example is that we've open sourced our javascript frontend (http://github.com/badger/frontend) which exclusively uses our API (http://badger.github.com/). We think the domain industry is ripe for disruption and we think we have the right team and ideas to execute.
As you pointed out though we don't have a proven track record. Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about that. Service guarantees and long-term contracts might seem nice on the surface but wouldn't really change much if we went out of business. I believe the quote goes something like: "The only two things guaranteed in life are death and taxes. (Benjamin Franklin)"
That said, we're a startup in San Francisco with an office and employees and have been around for over a year. We previously were a domain reseller (rhinonames.com) but have spent the last six months becoming ICANN accredited and building badger.com. We think we can build the best registrar around and we're here to stay.
That's very enthusiastic and I applaud it, but could you perhaps provide some more substance beyond an open source frontend. How can we use the API? What benefits do you think exposing an API would provide? What are the capabilities of your API, etc.?
I don't mean to offend or spam. We just removed the "invite-only" aspect about an hour ago and are now launching to the public. It seemed like a "Show HN" was appropriate.
We've been working on this non-stop for six months... it's not just a landing page. We are are a fully functional ICANN accredited registrar. We offer domain registration/transfers, DNS hosting, WHOIS privacy, email forwarding, url forwarding, etc.
Regarding the open source frontend, what's that have to do with profitability? We think that, if anything, having an open source frontend will lower costs because our users can help us build the features they want.
Regarding assurance, I believe the expression goes: "The only two things certain in life are death and taxes" (Benjamin Franklin?). That said, we're a real company with employees located in San Francisco and we're planning on being around for a long time.
And to answer your question, no, we're not profitable at $8/credit, so you should definitely stock up because this special won't last for long.
Oops, somehow I accidentally cut off one line. I actually was going to ask if you were planning to open source the backend code, since you open sourced the frontend. Maybe that doesn't make sense because then someone else could start a competing registrar without the dev costs.
I guess my main concern is that I get a bunch of credits (instead of tacking on many years of renewals), and then poof they disappear one day. If I had used them to buy extra years, then those would stay even if the registrar goes awol (as I've heard in the horror stories).
Could you theoretically "make it up in volume" for $8/credit? It looks like it costs wholesale $7.34 + $0.18 = $7.52 for one year of .com, I guess you would need at least a million domains (1% of the .com market share) to about break even with salaries, rent, and fixed registrar fees.
