Gandi

What Gandi Domains actually is

Gandi is one of the oldest independent domain registrars in Europe. The company was registered in 1999 and launched its registration service in March 2000, founded by French internet pioneers Pierre Beyssac, Laurent Chemla, David Nahmias, and Valentin Lacambre. It is Gandi SAS, a French company headquartered on boulevard Massena in Paris, ICANN-accredited under IANA ID 81. Ownership has changed hands more than once: a management team led by Stephan Ramoin bought it in 2005, private equity firm Montefiore Investment acquired it in February 2019, and in February 2023 Gandi merged with Total Webhosting Solutions to form the Your.Online group. That corporate history matters, because the product has changed character with each chapter.

The product itself is a full-service registrar: domain registration and transfers across more than 750 domain endings, LiveDNS (free Anycast DNS with DNSSEC and automatic zone backups), free email aliases and forwarding, WHOIS privacy at no charge, a public API covering domains, DNS, email and billing, plus optional add-ons — email mailboxes, TLS certificates, web hosting, and VPS. Roughly one million gTLD domains sit under Gandi's IANA ID as of October 2026, down from the 2.5 million the company reported in 2019.

For twenty years Gandi's pitch was a "no bullshit" registrar: no upsell carousel at checkout, no fake "free" first year with a punishing renewal, and a bundle of included services that actually got used. We have recommended Gandi on that basis in the past. Two things have eroded it. The April 2023 pricing change ended the included mailboxes — two 3 GB mailboxes had shipped with every domain since 2017 — first limiting them to the first year, then retiring the free GandiMail service entirely on 30 November 2023 and converting everyone to a paid subscription, including customers who had prepaid registrations for years. Renewal pricing has also climbed well past the rest of the market. The registrar is still competent and principled by industry standards, but "no bullshit" now needs an asterisk.

Pricing: what you really pay

Gandi publishes a single price list per TLD and per currency, with no first-year bait. A .com costs $11.00 to register and $38.38 per year to renew at base ("A") rates; transfers in cost $11.00. Other staples at the same rate level: .net $12.99 to register and $39.98 to renew, .org $8.99 and $39.98, .io $31.99 and $74.99. Occasional promo TLDs dip lower — .xyz was listing at $1.99 for registration against a $39.98 renewal when we checked. In GBP the same .com is £10.80 to register and £38.38 to renew. All of these exclude VAT where applicable.

The renewal number is the story. At $38.38 per year, .com renewals run roughly 3.5 times the at-cost wholesale price (about $10.46 including ICANN fees). Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost; Porkbun and the budget registrars renew .com in the mid-teens. Gandi's renewal is one of the highest in our comparison set, above GoDaddy's $22.99. The company's counterweight is a volume discount grid: annual spend of $600–1,999 drops you to "B" rates, $2,000–5,999 to "C", $6,000–11,999 to "D", and $12,000+ to "E", where discounts reach 50% and reset every January. Portfolio holders with real volume can pull renewal costs toward respectability; a person with three domains cannot.

What the price includes is genuinely useful and mostly not upsold. WHOIS privacy is free and applies at $0.00 across the TLD list. LiveDNS is a proper Anycast DNS service with DNSSEC, configuration templates, and automatic DNS backups at no cost. Email aliases and forwarding addresses are included — a practical substitute for a mailbox if all you need is contact@ and sales@ landing in an inbox you already own. A TLS certificate is free for the first year with a domain. Beyond that, the add-ons are paid and priced like European business services: email is now a subscription rather than an inclusion, with a Standard mailbox starting around £5.99/month for 10 GB, Premium at £8.39/month for 50 GB, and Business at £11.99/month for 100 GB (VAT-inclusive figures from a 2026 third-party review). When the free-mailbox policy changed in April 2023, Gandi quoted £2.99/month for a standard mailbox — the entry price has effectively doubled since. Web hosting plans start at $2.00/month if you want a site attached to the domain. We would budget for a registrar-only relationship and buy email elsewhere unless one vendor's single invoice is worth the premium to you.

Performance & infrastructure

A registrar has no CPUs to benchmark, so what you are buying is DNS quality, control-plane reliability, and API depth — see our benchmarks for how we frame the rest of the market. On DNS, Gandi is strong. LiveDNS runs on Anycast with DNSSEC support and free automatic zone backups, and the record types people actually need (including AAAA for IPv6 endpoints) are all first-class. In our view this is one of the better default DNS offerings attached to a registrar at no extra charge; plenty of competitors sell a comparable product separately.

The control plane is covered by a public API spanning domains, DNS, email, and billing, which makes Gandi a reasonable target for portfolio automation — combined with bulk actions for portfolios and per-organization price rates, small registrars and agencies can run a book of domains here without manual clicking. Account security covers the basics we insist on: two-factor authentication and transfer locks, with domain transfer-lock controls in the dashboard.

Track record is long and mostly quiet. Twenty-six years of continuous operation, ICANN accreditation number 81, presence across offices in Paris, Luxembourg, San Francisco, and Taipei in its independent days, and customers in nearly 200 countries. Independent review data puts sentiment at 4.6 on Trustpilot across roughly 3,970 reviews — high for a registrar, though the recent reviews trend more negative than the average because of the mailbox removal and price increases. Support runs through a help center plus chat and ticket submission; there is no published uptime SLA for the registration and DNS services, which we consider normal for this category but worth stating plainly.

Where it falls short

Price, first. Renewing a .com at $38.38 is a deliberate choice by Gandi to fund its service margin, and it is far above what the same registration costs at dozens of other accredited registrars. For a domain investor or anyone past a handful of names, the volume-rate grid is the only thing making this defensible, and it requires $600 of annual spend before the first discount tier. Our benchmarks comparisons put this gap in stark relief: the difference between Gandi and an at-cost registrar on ten .com renewals pays for a small VPS.

Second, the 2023 mailbox decision was executed the way the worst registrars do it. Customers who had prepaid multi-year registrations on the strength of included email were told the mailboxes would be billed or deleted; the GandiMail service shut down on 30 November 2023 whatever the domain's remaining term. Whether or not that was contractually permissible, it retroactively changed a bundle people had already paid for. In our view that does more damage to the "no bullshit" claim than any price list could, and it is the main reason our rating sits below what the feature set alone would earn.

Third, the add-on stack has thinned. Free email is gone; SSL is free for the first year only, then paid; the mail product is expensive for what is, on the Standard tier, 10 GB of storage. And the corporate story is no longer the indie registrar of the 2000s — Gandi is a brand inside Your.Online, a Dutch-hosted roll-up formed with Total Webhosting Solutions, the same ownership pattern that elsewhere in this industry has preceded further price increases. Nothing wrong with being a subsidiary; the independence premium is simply no longer part of what you are paying for.

Who should pick this

We would pick Gandi when the buyer is privacy-conscious, EU-based, and wants one principled, GDPR-native vendor for a small portfolio — with the budget tolerance of a business rather than a hobbyist. French jurisdiction and a French-registered operating company appeal to EU organizations that care about where their registrar sits. The free WHOIS privacy, free DNSSEC-capable Anycast DNS, free forwarding, and clean, upsell-free checkout remain a genuinely better experience than the budget tier of this market, and the API plus bulk tooling suit agencies managing client domains.

We would not pick Gandi for a domain portfolio of any size without first pricing the volume-rate grid against Cloudflare at cost, nor for anyone who wants email bundled with the domain — that product is gone in its free form, and the paid replacement costs more than standalone email from several specialists. If your priority is the lowest total cost of ownership over five years, our pick stays with at-cost or mid-market registrars; at Gandi's renewal prices, the five-year cost of a single .com is roughly $164 at base rates before any add-ons.

Key takeaways

• .com at $11.00 to register but $38.38 to renew — one of the highest renewal rates in our comparison, roughly 3.5x at-cost; volume rates (A–E, up to 50% off) only kick in from $600 annual spend
• The classic bundle is partly gone: WHOIS privacy, Anycast LiveDNS with DNSSEC and automatic DNS backups, and unlimited aliases/forwarding are still free; the two included mailboxes were withdrawn in 2023 and mail is now a paid subscription from around £5.99/month
• 2023's mailbox removal hit prepaid customers mid-term and is the single biggest mark against the "no bullshit" reputation; the merger with Total Webhosting Solutions into Your.Online closed the independent-registrar era
• Strengths that remain: 750+ TLDs, ICANN-accredited since the earliest cohort (IANA ID 81), 2FA and transfer locks, a public API across domains/DNS/email/billing, and bulk portfolio tools
• Our view: the right pick for EU and privacy-focused buyers running a handful of names who value clean UX and French jurisdiction; the wrong pick for portfolio scale or bundled email on a budget

Sources

• https://en.gandi.net/en/about-us
• https://icannwiki.org/Gandi.net
• https://tldes.com/registrars/gandi
• https://www.gandi.net/en-GB/domain
• https://docs.gandi.net/en/billing/price_rates/index.html
• https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/10/how-to-set-up-your-gandi-email
• https://tuta.com/blog/gandi-removes-free-mail-service
• https://profiletree.com/gandi-domain-review
• https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/psa-gandi-net-bought-out-eliminating-included-email-raising-prices.1490573
• https://your.online/gandi-tws-join-forces-to-form-your-online/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandi