A domain costs from a couple of euros a year, and studios invoice fifty for it. Where the difference comes from, why the .ua zone is not for everyone, and the one line in the paperwork that matters more than the price.
The domain is registered in your name from day one, and the first year is on us. After that it is about ₴300 a year straight to the registrar.
A domain registered to the developer is the most expensive thing you can lose: code and text can be rewritten, a domain cannot.
A domain is the address people find you at. A site can be rewritten, a design changed, hosting moved in an hour. An address already printed on a sign, handed to clients and indexed by Google is close to impossible to change: you lose your search positions, and some people simply never find you again.
So the real question is not «how much» but «in whose name». The domain must be registered to you — your name or your company, your email in the contacts. If it sits in the developer’s account, then on the day you fall out, the address stays with them. This is not a scare story: it is the most common reason people come to rebuild a site from scratch instead of taking their own.
The domain is 2% of a website budget. Owning it is 100% of your visibility in search.
A domain is not bought forever — it is rented by the year. The zone matters more than the registrar you pick inside that zone.
| Zone | Who may register it | Roughly per year | When to take it |
|---|---|---|---|
| .com.ua | anyone | EUR 5–9 | the default choice for a Ukrainian business |
| .ua | only the holder of a registered trademark for that name | EUR 15–33 | when the trademark already exists |
| .com | anyone | EUR 10–15 | if you work outside Ukraine too |
| .org.ua / .kyiv.ua | anyone | EUR 3–8 | community projects, local stories |
| .pp.ua | anyone | free to EUR 2 | learning and temporary sites, not for business |
Prices as of August 2026, deliberately given as ranges: registrars differ and change them. Check on the day you buy — it takes a minute.
A second-level .ua domain is not handed out on request. You need a trademark certificate matching the domain name. Registering a trademark in Ukraine is a separate procedure with filing, examination and waiting, and it costs many times the domain itself.
For most small businesses the right answer is .com.ua. It is not worse for search: Google gives no preference to a second-level zone over a third-level one. The difference is image, not technology.
The most common trick is a cheap first year and a normal price afterwards. A domain that costs one euro at checkout can cost fifteen at renewal, and you find out eleven months later.
Before buying, look at two numbers side by side: the first year and the renewal. If the second one is hard to find, that is already your answer about the registrar.
Then switch on auto-renewal and make sure the card behind it will have money on it. An expired domain first goes into a redemption period at several times the price, then to open sale. Catching dropped domains is a business of its own, and the ones caught fastest are those that already have traffic.
For Ukrainian zones — a Ukrainian registrar, since .com.ua and .ua run through accredited ones. For .com the choice is wider, and the price gap between a cheap and an expensive registrar reaches two times for the very same service.
Cloudflare Registrar is worth knowing about: it sells domains at cost, with no markup and no renewal jump — you pay exactly what it pays the registry. There is one catch, and for us it matters: it does not serve Ukrainian zones. Excellent for .com, pointless for .com.ua.
And one thing almost nobody does: check the domain’s past. Search it on Google and look it up on archive.org to see whether a site lived there before you. A domain with a history of spam can hand you penalties you will spend months clearing instead of growing.
The first year of the domain is on us, and it is registered to the client from the start: your name in the contacts, your access to the account. Not «to the studio, transferred later» — straight away. It costs us a few hundred hryvnia and removes the one risk that cannot be fixed afterwards.
From the second year you renew it yourself, directly with the registrar, with no markup from us. The invoice comes to you, and you see the real price rather than a «domain maintenance» line.
The domain, the hosting and the mailbox should be in your name. A developer is someone you can replace without losing anything of your own.
If the domain is already in someone else’s name — here is how to get it back.