We want to start with something that most people in this industry would never say out loud: the annual renewal fee is not a cost-recovery mechanism. It is a business model. It is a permanent claim on something you were told you owned. And it has been so normalised, so quietly accepted as the price of having a presence online, that almost nobody stops to ask whether it was ever a reasonable thing to demand in the first place.

We stopped and asked. What we found changed the way we thought about everything we were building.

The moment we decided

There was no dramatic boardroom debate, no whiteboard covered in pros and cons. The decision not to charge renewal fees came early, and it came easily, because once you frame the question honestly, there is really only one answer that makes sense.

We were thinking about what we were actually building. Not a web service. Not a subscription product. Not a software tool that needs to be maintained, updated, patched and improved on an ongoing basis in order to keep delivering value. We were building something much more fundamental than that: a permanent, onchain address that belonged to a person. A piece of digital identity rooted in place — in Queensland, in a city, in a community, in home.

And when you think about it that way, the renewal fee stops making sense almost immediately.

You do not pay an annual fee to keep your name. You do not pay a renewal to keep your postal address attached to your house. You do not send a cheque every year to stay born in Brisbane. These things are yours because they reflect something real about who you are and where you come from. The idea that a company should insert itself into that relationship every twelve months, hold out its hand, and threaten to take the thing back if you don’t comply — we found that genuinely troubling. Not inconvenient. Not suboptimal. Troubling.

So we didn’t do it.

What the traditional model actually is

Before we can explain our values, we need to be honest about the system we are operating in contrast to. The traditional domain name model is built on a foundational premise that most people never think about: when you register a domain, you are not buying it. You are renting it.

The language used in the industry normalises this completely. Registration fees. Renewal fees. Expiry dates. Auto-renew settings. Grace periods. All of this is the language of tenancy, not ownership. You are a tenant in someone else’s system, and the landlord — whether it is the registrar, the registry, or the layered infrastructure above them both — reserves the right to take the address back the moment you miss a payment.

That is not a metaphor. It is literally what happens. Domains expire. They get dropped. They get snatched up by squatters within hours of lapsing. People lose businesses, email histories, communities, brands — real, built things — because they forgot to renew, because their credit card expired, because they were sick, or busy, or broke for a month. And the system does not care. The clock runs, the fee goes unpaid, and the address vanishes.

The cruelty of this is made sharper when you understand the cost structure behind it. The marginal cost of maintaining a record in a centralised registry database is, in real terms, very close to zero. The ongoing technical cost of keeping your address alive is not the reason renewal fees exist at the level they do. Renewal fees exist because they are enormously profitable. They are recurring revenue on a captive customer base. Once you have built something meaningful on an address — a website, a following, a business identity, an email history — you cannot easily walk away. The switching cost is too high. So you pay. Year after year after year. Not because it costs the provider anything meaningful to maintain your record, but because you have no choice.

This is the renewal trap. It is not unique to domain names — it is the same logic at work in any subscription model that monetises your switching friction rather than your ongoing satisfaction with the product. But it is particularly corrosive in the context of digital identity, because digital identity is not a product. It is a piece of who you are.

The landlord problem

There is a relationship embedded in the renewal fee that we think deserves to be named clearly. It is a landlord-tenant relationship. And it is a strange kind of landlord-tenant relationship at that — one where the tenant builds the property from scratch, and the landlord contributes nothing except the ongoing permission for the tenant to remain.

In traditional real estate, at least the landlord owns something physical. There is a building, there is land, there is capital tied up in the property. The fee reflects a real underlying asset. You can disagree about whether that is a just arrangement — people do — but at least the structure makes a certain logical sense.

The domain renewal fee does not even have that to justify it. What does a registrar own, exactly, after year one? They have a database entry. They have your record. They are charging you, annually, for the ongoing privilege of existing in their ledger. And if you stop paying, they don’t just lose the profit on your account — they take the address itself. The address you chose. The address you built on. The address that, by any reasonable moral intuition, should be yours.

We kept coming back to one question during the design of Queensland Foundation: what does ownership actually mean?

Not in a legal or technical sense — we understand the technical realities of how domains are structured. We mean: what should ownership feel like? What should it mean in practice? What is the experience we want a person to have when they claim an address in their community, under a name that means something to them?

Ownership should mean permanence. It should mean that the decision you made — to plant your flag, to say “this is my address in this place” — cannot be undone by someone else’s billing system. It should mean that five years from now, ten years from now, thirty years from now, your address is still yours, without you having to think about it, without you having to remember a payment, without you having to maintain a relationship with a company whose interests are not aligned with yours.

That is what we built. And the renewal fee was incompatible with it. Full stop.

Identity is not a subscription

We think there is something philosophically wrong with treating identity as a subscription product, and we think it is worth being explicit about why.

Subscription models make sense when the value being delivered is ongoing. A music streaming service makes new music available every day. A software product receives updates, security patches, new features. A cloud hosting provider is actively running servers on your behalf, consuming electricity, maintaining hardware, providing support. In all of these cases, the recurring fee reflects a recurring service.

A digital identity address is not like this. Once your address exists, once it is written into the chain, once it resolves to you — nothing needs to keep happening for it to keep being yours. There is no ongoing service to justify an ongoing fee. The work was done at the moment of registration. Everything after that is just the record persisting, as records do.

When a company charges you annually for a domain name, they are not providing you with an annual service. They are providing you with annual permission. Permission to keep existing in their system. Permission to maintain access to something that, in any meaningful sense, should already be yours.

We refuse to be that kind of company.

This matters even more in the context of place-based identity. A .queensland address or a .brisbane address is not a neutral technical resource, like a cloud server you can spin up and down as needed. It is a statement about who you are and where you come from. It might be your name. It might be your business. It might be a piece of creative work, a community project, a record of something that matters to you. These are not the kinds of things that should be subject to an annual permission slip.

What happens to people under the renewal model

Abstract philosophy aside, the renewal model causes real, concrete harm to real people. We thought about this a lot, and we want to describe it plainly.

Every year, addresses are lost because people forget to renew. Not bad people. Not careless people. Busy people. People who are going through hard times. People who are ill. People who are grieving. People who are travelling. People who set up an address years ago, built something meaningful with it, and then had one bad month and lost everything attached to that address — not because their creation was destroyed, but because their permission to keep it was revoked.

This is not a hypothetical. It happens constantly, at scale, across the traditional domain system. Domain expiry is an industry in itself. There are businesses that do nothing except monitor expiring domains and snap them up the moment they lapse, then attempt to sell them back to the original owner at a significant markup, or simply hold them indefinitely. That industry exists because the renewal fee model creates a constant supply of lapsed addresses — addresses that real people lost because they missed a payment.

We found this genuinely disturbing. The thought that someone could build a .brisbane or .queensland address — put their name on it, build a digital life around it, establish it as their presence in a community they care about — and then lose it because they missed a single payment, because they had a hard year, because life got in the way… that was not something we were willing to design into our system. So we didn’t.

The permanence of ownership under Queensland Foundation is not a premium feature. It is not something we will ever use as an upsell. It is the baseline. It is the floor of what we think digital identity should be. You buy it once, it’s yours, and nothing changes that.

The compounding effect

There is another dimension to the renewal fee that rarely gets discussed: its compounding cost over a lifetime.

When someone acquires an onchain address through Queensland Foundation, the price starts at five dollars. One payment, made once. That is the entire financial relationship. But consider what the equivalent cost would be under a traditional renewal model, compounded over a meaningful period of time.

Even at a modest annual renewal fee — and traditional domain renewals are rarely modest once you add privacy protection, transfer fees, and the various add-ons that registrars layer on top of the base cost — the lifetime cost of maintaining a traditional domain address is substantial. Across a decade, it becomes significant. Across a lifetime, it becomes something that many people genuinely cannot sustain.

This is not a small thing. The ability to have a permanent digital identity should not depend on whether you can afford to keep paying for it indefinitely. It should not be the case that a person who thrives economically gets to keep their address forever, while a person who hits a rough patch loses theirs. That is not a version of digital inclusion we wanted to participate in.

By making the purchase a one-time event — one fixed, accessible price — we removed the ongoing financial relationship entirely. We are not in a position to extract value from you over time. We do not have that kind of leverage over you. And we do not want it.

The alignment problem

We want to talk about something that doesn’t get discussed enough: what renewal fees do to the relationship between a provider and the people they serve.

When your business model depends on renewal fees, your interests and your users’ interests are, in certain important ways, misaligned. You need people to keep paying. This creates incentives — some obvious, some subtle — that work against the person paying. It incentivises lock-in. It makes switching costly. It makes it harder to leave than it should be. It creates a relationship where the provider’s revenue depends not on the ongoing value they deliver, but on the ongoing cost of leaving.

We found this misalignment intolerable. Not just as a business decision — though it is that too — but as a values position. We want Queensland Foundation to be a project that Queenslanders trust. We want people to feel that we built this for them, not that we built it to monetise them. And you cannot feel that way about an organisation that has a financial interest in making it hard for you to walk away.

The one-time purchase model does something interesting to this dynamic. Once you have paid, we have no ongoing financial claim on you. Your address is yours. Our relationship with you is complete in terms of the financial transaction. There is no lever we can pull to pressure you into continuing to do business with us. There is no renewal reminder we can send. There is no grace period during which your address sits in limbo while we wait to see if you pay up.

This is, from a purely commercial standpoint, a difficult model to sustain. We understand that. We built Queensland Foundation knowing that we would need to generate revenue through means other than perpetual extraction from our users — primarily through the ongoing availability of new addresses to new claimants, and through the value of the namespace itself as it grows.

But we think it is the only model that is actually honest. It is the only model that puts us in genuine alignment with the people we are serving. And alignment with the people we serve is the only foundation we wanted to build on.

Why permanence is a design value, not a feature

We need to be careful here about the language of product development, because we think it can obscure what is actually going on.

In a lot of product contexts, “permanence” or “no renewal fees” would be described as a feature. Something you list in a comparison table. A line item that distinguishes you from competitors. And on the surface, that is true — it is something that distinguishes what we built from the traditional model.

But for us, it is not a feature. It is a design value. The difference matters.

A feature is something you add because it makes the product better or more appealing. You could have chosen not to add it; you chose to add it because it tests well, or because competitors don’t have it, or because it solves a problem users have expressed.

A value is something you build into the architecture because it reflects something you believe. You do not consider removing it. You do not weigh it against alternatives. It is not optional. It is load-bearing.

Permanent ownership without renewal fees is load-bearing for us. It is part of what it means to say that we are building genuine ownership, not tenancy with nice branding. If we charged renewal fees, we would be doing exactly what every other domain provider does — just with a more interesting namespace. We would be participating in the same landlord-tenant dynamic, just dressed up in different clothes.

The permanence is not a selling point. It is a precondition. It is what makes the rest of the project worth doing.

On the argument that renewals fund the ecosystem

We should address the most common counterargument, because it is raised often and it deserves a straight answer.

The argument goes like this: renewal fees are how the ecosystem is funded. They pay for technical infrastructure, for ongoing development, for customer support, for the people who maintain the system. Without renewal fees, how does anyone pay for the ongoing costs of running a naming system?

This is a reasonable thing to ask, and we want to answer it seriously.

First, the technical reality: an onchain address, once written to a blockchain, does not require ongoing centralised infrastructure to persist. That is one of the fundamental properties of blockchain infrastructure — the record is maintained by the network, not by a private company’s servers. The ongoing cost of your address persisting is borne by the network, not by us. This fundamentally changes the economics compared to the traditional centralised registry model.

Second, and more importantly: the sustainability of a project and the ongoing extraction of fees from existing users are two entirely different things. Queensland Foundation is designed to be sustainable. The way we achieve that sustainability is through the ongoing availability of new addresses — through the natural growth of the namespace as more Queenslanders claim their place in it. We do not need to extract recurring revenue from people who have already bought in. We need to continue to do work that makes the namespace worth joining. Those are very different incentive structures, and they lead to very different relationships with the people we serve.

We chose the model that rewards us for doing good work, not the model that rewards us for making it hard to leave.

On the relationship between price and permanence

We want to say something about pricing, because we think it is related to this in ways that are not immediately obvious.

The starting price for a Queensland Foundation address is five dollars. One payment. No ongoing cost.

We chose that price deliberately. It is a price that almost anyone in Australia can afford. It is a price that does not exclude people based on economic circumstances. It is a price that says: this is for everyone who is from here, not just for people who can afford a premium product.

But there is a subtler point about the relationship between price and permanence. When you pay once, you know what you paid. You made a decision with full information. The total cost of your digital address is the number you saw at checkout — not that number multiplied by every year you continue to exist.

Under the renewal model, the price you see at registration is almost never the price you end up paying. Introductory offers expire. Renewal rates often increase after the first year. The true lifetime cost is deliberately obscured at the point of purchase, because if you knew the full cost you might make a different decision. This is a form of pricing dishonesty that we refuse to participate in.

The relationship between the price and the permanence is simple: five dollars, once, forever. That is the deal. There is no small print, no escalation, no renewal notice that arrives and quietly charges you more than you expected. What you see is what you pay, and what you pay is what you pay forever.

What we are actually trying to build

We want to close by saying something about what Queensland Foundation is ultimately for, because we think the renewal fee question is really a question about that.

We are trying to build a permanent, place-based layer of digital identity for Queensland. We want there to be a version of the internet where, if you are from Brisbane, or from the Gold Coast, or from Queensland broadly, you can say so in a way that is permanent and real. Not in a way that is contingent on your relationship with a company. Not in a way that can be taken from you. Not in a way that requires you to keep paying tribute to an infrastructure provider in order to maintain your connection to your own place of origin.

That might sound like an ambitious thing. It is. But the ambition starts with a very simple premise: that your name, your address, your digital identity — these things should belong to you.

Not to us. Not to a registry. Not to any third party whose business model depends on maintaining leverage over you. To you.

The renewal fee is the clearest possible expression of a system that doesn’t believe this. It is the mechanism by which a provider says: we don’t actually think this is yours. We think it is ours, and we will let you use it as long as you keep paying. Stop paying, and you will see whose it really is.

We built Queensland Foundation on the opposite belief. We believe that when someone claims a .queensland address or a .brisbane address or any of the addresses in the namespace we have secured, that address is theirs. Not on loan. Not subject to annual review. Theirs.

The permanence is not a marketing message. It is not a differentiator. It is a statement about what we believe digital identity should look like, and a commitment to building the infrastructure that makes that belief real.

We don’t believe in renewal fees because we don’t believe in digital tenancy. We believe in ownership. And ownership, if it means anything at all, has to mean something that doesn’t expire.

That is the whole of our position. We have tried to state it clearly, without flinching, and without dressing it up in language that softens the critique of the model we are operating against. The traditional domain system made choices that prioritised revenue extraction over genuine ownership. We made different choices. We think they were the right ones. And we will keep making them.