I’m looking at my bank statement and seeing a lot of CF transactions for the domain names we manage.
It would be nice to be able to synchronize billing for all domains to be charged in one large single payment. This would make accounting easier and allow for easier future cash flow forecasting.
This would save CF on transaction fees on a product it gives away at cost.
All that would have to be done is literally writing a button & script to calculate all the domains, X time left before renewal, and to sum with Y for the total to consolidate billing. Any new domains added would be pro-rated and synced with the annual billing date. Also, let the user choose the renewal date and charge them accordingly when setting it up.
But domains are an annual charge, and Cloudflare doesn’t control that. You pay for a year, and you get one year from that date. How would you sync up their expiration dates?
I can’t think of any way that Cloudflare could even sync up all the ones in the same month so they would be billed with the monthly billing cycle. They can’t bill before or after the fact because a user might cancel auto-renew between the bill and the actual expiration date.
I would like this too. I ideally want all my domains to expire on 31 Dec 20xx so that renewals happen at the same time and invoiced together.
A year is 365.days so partial renewals would be a fraction of the annual cost + ICANN fees.
In my case some of my renewals is a year or two plus a number of months and days. So the sum would add up for this one time catch up for the existing domains. If I were to register a new domain it too could benefit from this.
You would have to contact the registry for that TLD to find out if they would allow partial-year renewals, as Cloudflare (a domain reseller) has to follow their rules.
The idea here is to consolidate invoicing. The actual renewal dates can be different.
When I am charged for autorenewal is the main issue. I would be paying in advance. Since the only expense here is ICANN fees (and everything else is what cloudflare charges) this should be simple. Having an $8 invoice here and another one over there is annoying. Having one invoice per renewal year is much more manageable.
It really is not. Consolidating invoices is among the most basic acts in accounting.
I thought the community forum was useless to ask questions. Such forums typically only promote hostility. You solidified my views on that. So this was not entirely useless!
With ConsoliDate, you can synchronize the dates for when your .com and .net domain names renew. This will change your renewal dates from your initial registration date to a date you select. You can ConsoliDate the renewal dates for a domain once per year.
With Domain Expiration Sync, you choose which day your .COM and .NET domains expire. It makes it easier to manage renewals for multiple domains and keeps your inbox less cluttered.
Ok, an example of where this is done. I do find it interesting that both examples specifically target .com and .net. Both Verisign, and no other TLD at Cloudflare is with Verisign. Oddly enough the only other gTLDs Verisign run (.name and .jobs) aren’t in Cloudflare Registrar.
Maybe @laurie can let us know if this is something Cloudflare has looked into.
If my local DMV would do this for registration renewal, it’d make my life easier.
Ok to clarify how you’d like this to work. We bill you early for domain renewal (Dec 31) and if you don’t pay by the consolidated billing date we get to keep your domain even if it expires in June the following year. This seems like an awesome idea. Will absolutely pass it along to our team for consideration.
I have offered several ways of achieving what I wish, a consolidated invoice.
What you suggest would be the most simple implementation, correct. I would implement it slightly differently though. The actual date would be selected by the customer. I would personally chose 31 Dec for simplicity but others may pick a different date. So this is more of a renewal on a date of the customers choosing rather than when the domain expires. The rule could basically be something like “Automatically renew all domains expiring within one year after select date option”. Keep in mind sometimes renewals are years apart so those would be renewed more than one year for the catch up. So if the customer has a single domain expiring in 2023 and everything else in 2021, all selected domains would be able to catch up to that date.
The other way for the implementation would be the fractional way that GoDaddy and others preform. There they charge for the fraction of the cost to make up for the. For .com and .net domains this seems to be a possibility. As with before this may include one or more years for some domains to catch up. GoDaddy restricts this act with once per year per domain. CloudFlare could implement something similar. This method would be cleaner and less confusing. It would also allow consolidation when a new domain is brought in. Instead of getting the full duration + 1 year, cloudflare could offer consolidation from the get go.
Maybe I have overly detailed this but the actual process would be much simpler. Select a date and let all domains catch up to that and charge this in one go.
I’m all in favour of reducing the amount of bills/invoices from CF. However, most TLDs do not support partial renewals. It looks like the only TLDs are .net and .com, so depending on your requirements that may or may not work.
Personally, I’d prefer to put an amount down as a deposit/credit, and have bills paid against that credit rather than lots and lots of small transactions. Even allowing annual billing for paid Cloudflare features would be useful. (I’m not even looking for a discount, just to pay for 12 months in one go.)
Indeed, based on my brief research, this consolidation would only work for .com and .net domains probably. I suppose this can change over time as more TLDs chose to support this.
For everything else what you describe is what I would want. In such a scenario, I would hope to make one payment per renewal year and have them appear on a single invoice. Chasing down individual $8-$9 invoices is a chore (and a bore).
In my case I have a few .com domains and one .info domain on cloudflare. If .info cannot be consolidated, I would prefer all the .com’s to catch up to .info and that would solve my issue.
The deposit would not work for me since that is a payment not paired with an invoice. This may differ from one fiscal regime to another. It may be something optional as well for some.
SYNC is exactly what I had in mind when starting this thread. Nice to see it’s actually a function available within the system.
How how much pizza and beer is it going to take for CF devs to implement this? Give me a total and I’ll start a crowdfunding campaign to make this happen.