Porkbun is what Namecheap is supposed to be: clean dashboard, transparent prices, free WHOIS privacy, free email forwarding, no checkout games. Developers who try it usually don't go back. The trade-off is that nobody's heard of it.
The registrar market has two tiers of pricing. The first tier — Namecheap, GoDaddy, Squarespace — runs on first-year promotional pricing followed by higher renewal years and a checkout full of upsells. The second tier — Cloudflare, Porkbun, NameSilo — charges a flat price every year, includes WHOIS privacy free, and doesn't try to bundle SSL or hosting at the cash register. The difference in your annual bill, on a portfolio of even five domains, is meaningful.
Porkbun's pitch within that second tier is "we're the friendly one." Cloudflare is fast and cheap but forces you to use Cloudflare's DNS. Porkbun lets you use any DNS provider you like, ships features (WHOIS privacy, email forwarding, SSL via Let's Encrypt, an API) that other budget registrars charge for, and has a UI that doesn't feel like 2008. The catch is the absence of brand recognition — if you tell a non-technical teammate "I bought the domain at Porkbun," there's a chance they'll think it's a joke.
For developers buying domains for their own projects, that doesn't matter. This tutorial walks the purchase, points out the things that surprised me the first time, and explains what makes Porkbun specifically a good fit for someone who already uses LingCode.
Search on the front page. Porkbun shows availability across many TLDs at once, with the actual price for each — first year and renewal years are the same number, no asterisks.
The price you see is what you'll pay. .com sits around $10–11; many newer TLDs run $5–15. Promotional sales happen sometimes (especially for the first year of certain TLDs) — those are real, not bait-and-switch, but the renewal price is the price you're committing to from year 2 onward.
The cart shows your domain at its price. WHOIS privacy is free and pre-checked. Email forwarding is free and pre-checked. SSL is free (via Let's Encrypt) and pre-checked. There's no premium DNS upsell. No website builder. No SSL "buy now" upsell.
You enter your contact info, pick a payment method, and click. The whole flow is a single page. No "are you sure you don't want to add X" interstitial.
[email protected] to forward to your existing inbox. You can't send from [email protected] with that alone — for outbound, you still need a real mailbox service (Fastmail, Google Workspace, etc.). Inbound forwarding for free is plenty for most personal/project domains.
Click into the domain after purchase. The DNS panel is a list of records with inline add/edit. A record types — A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV — and TTL fields. No confusing modes, no "advanced view" hidden behind a tab.
For a typical setup pointing at a server: A record at @ with your IP, CNAME at www pointing to @, and you're done. The DNS tutorial covers the record types if any of that's unfamiliar.
Porkbun has an HTTP API for everything you'd want to automate: list domains, fetch DNS records, create / update / delete records, manage URL forwarding. API keys are free; you generate them in the account settings.
This matters when you're managing many domains or running infrastructure-as-code. Terraform's Porkbun provider works; the API has good rate limits; you can have an agent (like the one running in your lingcode CLI) update DNS records as part of a script. Bigger registrars charge for API access; Porkbun doesn't.
[email protected] as a sendable address), you need a separate provider. Some registrars sell this bundled; Porkbun doesn't.For everything else — your projects, your portfolio, your throwaway names, your team's tooling — Porkbun fits.