One of the nice things about having an Account Manager at GoDaddy is that he can help pull reports for me that would take longer for me to pull. At the beginning of the year, I ask my Account Manager to send me a report of all renewals I paid the previous year so I can accurately track this cost on my expense report. One report that isn’t available for me to download on my own is the $.90 ACH fee report.

GoDaddy has a policy of charging customers $.90 for every outgoing ACH payment it sends. Regardless of whether a sale is for $150,000 or a monthly LTO payment is for just $80, GoDaddy charges $.90 per ACH it sends customers. If a customer has multiple payouts going out on the same day, as in the case of LTO deals, GoDaddy will typically batch the payments together and charge only one $.90 fee. I am not certain if GoDaddy will batch 2 LTO deals and a BIN deal in the same payment if they are due on the same day, but it’s possible that happens, too.

As far as I can see, GoDaddy doesn’t even report this fee to customers. You can look at the image above and see the payout amount on top and the amount deposited into my bank account – it differs by $.90.

Over the past few days, I received quite a few emails from GoDaddy with the subject “A product’s been removed from your GoDaddy account.” Jamie Zoch mentioned this on X, and I am sure there are many other GoDaddy customers who received the same email.

This email is typically one I receive after letting a domain name expire or when I have sold a domain name and its transferred away from GoDaddy. I typically receive these emails a short time after the domain name is deleted or transferred.

As my portfolio has become larger, I have been spending more time evaluating whether to renew domain names or let them expire and save money. A domain name that looked good to me in 2016 may not look so good today. Renewals for .com domain names may be just in the $10/year range, but there’s no sense in throwing good money after bad money.

When I am evaluating domain names, I look at several factors, some of which are hard numbers and others are gut instinct. Some of these factors include the following:

I’ve sold a few lower-valued domain names using GoDaddy as the intermediary at 5% commission. These are generally deals I want to close quickly, and I am willing to give up $xx or $xxx for the sake of expedience.

The one issue I have had with using GoDaddy and its custom checkout link is that the deals utilized a Dan.com url instead of GoDaddy. This would be confusing for a buyer who is told the deal will be transacted via GoDaddy but then had to click through to Dan.com. I explained it by saying “We can use Dan.com (owned by GoDaddy) to transact.”

I wrote about this issue a couple of months ago:

For the past 15 years, Bob Mountain has held senior roles at NameMedia (then parent company of Afternic) and GoDaddy. During his tenure, Bob’s area of expertise has been business development and partner management, serving in different C-suite and Vice President roles.

Bob shared some personal news with me that he is allowing me to share here. Bob will be retiring from GoDaddy at the end of this year.