📝 Written ● Beginner Updated 2026-05-13

Buy a domain from Cloudflare Registrar

Cloudflare Registrar charges what the registry charges. No markup, no upsells, no first-year bait followed by an inflated renewal. The trade-off — and there's only one — is that you have to use Cloudflare's DNS. For most developer projects, that's a feature, not a constraint.

Most domain registrars are in two businesses. The first is the boring database business of recording who owns what name. The second, and where the actual margins live, is selling you adjacent services: email, SSL, "premium" DNS, hosting, privacy. A $9 domain at checkout often turns into $50 in upsells, and a $9 first year becomes $18 in year two. The friction this creates is real — you waste time unchecking boxes — but the pricing also bothers people who simply want to pay for the name and move on.

Cloudflare Registrar's pitch is that they only do the first business. They charge the registry wholesale cost (about $9.15 for a .com at time of writing) and pass it through. No "renewal year" markup. No upsells in the checkout. The price is the price, and it's the same every year.

The trade-off is that Cloudflare requires the domain to use Cloudflare's nameservers. You can't park it at Cloudflare and use someone else's DNS; the domain has to live in your Cloudflare account end-to-end. For most developers this is fine — Cloudflare's DNS is fast and free and they have all the records you need. For people with a strong preference for a different DNS provider, it's a deal-breaker. That's the whole catch.

What you'll learn

Why Cloudflare can charge less than Namecheap (it's not a loss leader)
What domains you can and can't register here
The one-step domain registration flow
Why "uses Cloudflare's nameservers" is mostly a feature
When to choose a different registrar instead

Step 1: Make a Cloudflare account

Free; takes a minute

Sign up at cloudflare.com. The free tier is enough for everything we'll do here. Set up 2FA on the account — this is the account that will hold both your domain and (eventually) your DNS, so it's worth a second factor.

If you already have an account because of any of Cloudflare's other products (Workers, R2, Pages, Tunnel, anything), you can use that. No need for a separate registrar account.

Step 2: Search for the domain

Dashboard → Domain Registration → Register Domains

In the Cloudflare dashboard, find Domain Registration → Register Domains. Cloudflare reshuffles their dashboard nav every so often; if the location below the screenshots online has moved, the global search at the top of the dashboard (/) finds it instantly — type "register".

Search for the name. Cloudflare shows the price upfront for every TLD it supports — and importantly, that's the price every year. There's no "$9 first year, $18 renewal" sleight of hand.

Not every TLD is available — Cloudflare supports a subset, focused on developer-relevant extensions (.com, .net, .org, .io, .dev, .app, .ai, country codes, etc.). If your desired TLD isn't there, you have to register elsewhere.

Comparing prices: The numbers on Cloudflare are wholesale-cost-plus-ICANN-fee. For a .com, that's about $9.15 today. Compare against the renewal-year price (not the first-year sale price) at any other registrar. The gap is usually $5–10 per year.

Step 3: Checkout — there's nothing to skip

One line item, one click

The checkout has the domain. No SSL upsells. No PremiumDNS upsells. No website builder. No mailbox. WHOIS privacy is included free and on by default.

Fill in your contact info (used for the registry; redacted from public WHOIS by privacy), enter a payment method, confirm. You own the domain.

Step 4: The "Cloudflare nameservers" thing

Why it's mostly a feature

The minute you finish checkout, Cloudflare creates a DNS zone for your domain with their nameservers (NSx.cloudflare.com, two of them). You can't change the nameservers. You can only manage DNS records inside Cloudflare.

For most developer projects, this is good:

Cloudflare's DNS is among the fastest globally. Free, anycast, well-cached.
The dashboard is clean. A/CNAME/MX/TXT records as expected; modern UI; no weird limits.
Free TLS via Cloudflare's CDN. If you point the domain at a server through Cloudflare's proxy, you get HTTPS automatically.
DDoS protection on the free tier. You probably don't need it, but it's there.

It's a constraint when: you specifically need a third-party DNS provider (Route 53, DNSimple, etc.) for reasons (existing infra, contractual). Cloudflare Registrar won't fit. Buy from Namecheap or another registrar that lets you set custom nameservers.

Step 5: Add your first DNS record

To point the domain at something

The domain is registered but doesn't point anywhere yet. In the Cloudflare dashboard, click into the domain, then DNS in the sidebar. Add the records you need:

To point root domain at an IP: an A record with name @, value your server IP.
To point www at the same place: a CNAME record with name www, value your root domain (or another A record).
To point at a host like Vercel or Netlify: usually a CNAME with name @ (or apex; Cloudflare flattens this), value the host's provided target.

The DNS connection tutorial covers the record types in more depth. The short version: A and CNAME are 95% of what you'll touch.

Step 6: When Cloudflare isn't the right pick

Three legitimate reasons to go elsewhere

You need a TLD Cloudflare doesn't carry. The supported list is reasonable but not exhaustive. .co.uk via Cloudflare? No. .xyz? Yes. Check the registration page before deciding.
You're tied to a different DNS provider. If your company runs DNS on Route 53 or NS1, you can't move there from Cloudflare. Buy from a registrar that allows custom nameservers (Namecheap, Porkbun, etc.).
You want a single bill for domain + email. Cloudflare doesn't sell email hosting. If you want one company for both, registrars like Namecheap or hosting providers like Fastmail (which does email + can register domains) are better fits.
You want a phone number to call when you lock yourself out. Cloudflare's free tier has no human support — recovery depends entirely on email + 2FA. If you lose both, getting the domain back is hard. For a domain that holds significant brand value or future revenue, a registrar with paid phone support might be the safer bet, even at higher per-year cost.

Transferring an existing domain in? Cloudflare accepts transfers from other registrars (auth code from the losing registrar, 5–7 day wait, the usual). If the domain is already live, lower the TTL on its existing DNS records to 300 a couple of days before you start the transfer — that way the nameserver change propagates fast and minimizes the cutover window.