In January of this year, I won Pinwheel.ai in an auction held at Namecheap. My winning bid was $541, as archived by NameBio. The total cost I paid was $726.96 with the $185.96 renewal fee tacked on to the total. I have been under the assumption that the renewal fee charged for .AI domain names adds two years to the registration.
This afternoon, I received a notification from Namecheap that Pinwheel.ai is going to expire on October 9, 2025. This expiration date was confirmed by me by doing a Whois search at DomainTools. That makes no sense considering I acquired the domain name around nine months ago and paid nearly $200 as a required “renew fee.”
The obvious question is why did Namecheap not renew the domain name for two years when I acquired the domain name in January? I was billed (heftily) for this renewal, so I believe the domain name should have been renewed through 2027.
I presume Namecheap will get this sorted out, but I want to highlight this in case others have the same issues with the .ai domain names they won at Namecheap.
Update: I contacted Namecheap support and they renewed the domain name for two years.
That why it is called Name “CHEAP”
get it!! 😁👍
They are well aware of this, but they continue to lapse, and take peoples money, along with constantly giving bad auth codes. It’s bad business at this point, your not the first.