Free Domain Privacy Is Now Included on Every Domain

Originally published at https://monstermegs.com/blog/free-domain-privacy/

Your domain name should not force you to publish your home address to the entire internet. For years, keeping your personal details off the public record meant paying extra for domain privacy, a small add-on that always felt like it should have been standard. That changes today. Free domain privacy is now included on every domain you register or transfer with us, on every supported TLD, with nothing to tick, upgrade, or pay for at checkout.

What used to be a $10.95 per year add-on is now simply part of owning a domain with MonsterMegs. This post explains what free domain privacy is, why it matters far more than most people realise, how it now works automatically, and the one honest trade-off we made to build it into the base price rather than sell it back to you as an upsell.

Free Domain Privacy Is Now Included on Every Domain

Here is the short version. Every domain registration and every inbound transfer on a supported TLD now comes with free domain privacy switched on from the moment the domain is active. You do not add it to your cart. You do not renew it separately. You do not get a reminder email six months later warning that your privacy is about to lapse unless you pay again.

Previously, domain privacy was an optional service that cost $10.95 per year on top of your registration. Plenty of people skipped it, either because they did not want another line item or because they simply did not realise what was being published about them. Making free domain privacy automatic closes that gap for good. Protection is now the default, not the upsell, and it stays that way for as long as the domain lives with us.

What Domain Privacy Actually Does

When you register a domain, your contact details are recorded in the public WHOIS directory, a global, searchable database of domain ownership. Without privacy, anyone at all can look up who owns a domain and pull the registrant record in seconds. Marketers, data brokers, scammers, and the occasional person who just dislikes your website all have the same easy access. Free domain privacy exists to close that door.

What the Public WHOIS Exposes

A standard WHOIS record can display your full name, postal address, email address, and phone number. None of that is hidden behind a login. It is scraped continuously by automated bots the moment a new domain appears. Domain privacy replaces those personal fields with the details of a privacy service, so the record still validates and your domain still works, but your real identity stays off the public page where strangers can read it.

Why That Exposure Matters

Exposed WHOIS data is the raw material for spam, phishing, and social engineering. It feeds the fake renewal notices, the aggressive cold calls, and the targeted scam emails that quote your actual domain and address to look legitimate. Regulators treat personal data seriously too: under the EU's GDPR, mishandling it can cost an organisation up to 4% of global annual revenue. Your own contact details deserve that same level of caution. Once your address is out there it is almost impossible to claw back, which is exactly why keeping it private from the very first day makes such a difference.

Included and Automatic, With No Add-On to Buy

The biggest practical change is that you no longer have to think about it. When your domain becomes active, free domain privacy is already applied. There is no separate product page, no checkbox buried in the order summary, and no upsell interrupting your checkout to ask whether you would like to protect the personal information you were about to publish by accident.

This matters because opt-in privacy quietly fails the people who need it most. The customers who forgot the checkbox, or assumed protection was already on, were exactly the ones left exposed. By making free domain privacy the standing default, the protection reaches everyone, including the person registering their very first domain who has never heard of WHOIS and would never have known to look for it.

Honest Pricing Instead of Checkout Upsells

Here is the honest part, because we would rather tell you plainly than quietly bury it. Privacy is not free for us to provide, so rather than charging for it as an add-on, we baked free domain privacy into the base price of the domain. That means a few of our headline registration prices went up modestly. A .com, for example, is now $25.95 per year with privacy already included in that number.

We think that is the more honest structure. The old model advertised a low sticker price and then recovered the difference through an add-on that plenty of buyers felt quietly pressured into. The new model shows you one price that already includes free domain privacy from the start. No add-on fees, no checkout upsells, and no decoy pricing designed to look cheaper than it really is. What you see on the domain is what you pay, protection fully included.

Why Most Customers Now Pay Less

It might sound like a straightforward price rise, but for most people it is the opposite. If you previously registered a .com and added the $10.95 privacy service, you were paying well over what the domain now costs with privacy built in. Once free domain privacy is rolled into the base price, the total for a privacy-protected domain actually drops for the majority of customers who used to buy it separately. For a lot of buyers that is a real saving on every renewal, not only the first year.

The smaller group who never added privacy will pay a little more, and in exchange they finally get protection they were previously going without, usually without realising it. Either way, the outcome is the same. Everyone walks away with their personal details kept off the public record, which is exactly where free domain privacy belongs in the first place.

How Free Domain Privacy Fits Our Privacy-First Approach

This is not a bolt-on marketing move. Privacy has shaped how we operate for a long time, and free domain privacy is simply the natural next step. We already offer anonymous domain registration for people who want to keep their identity off a domain entirely, and we accept cryptocurrency so you can pay without handing over card details tied to your legal name.

Anonymous Registration and Crypto Payments

Bundling privacy into every domain sits alongside those options rather than replacing them. If you want maximum separation between you and your domain, the anonymous route and crypto payment are still there for you. If you simply want free domain privacy applied without thinking about it, that now happens on its own. Strong privacy should be the floor that everyone stands on, not a premium tier reserved for the people who already know to ask for it.

Which Domains and TLDs Are Covered

Free domain privacy applies to both new registrations and inbound transfers across all supported TLDs. If you move an existing domain to us, privacy is applied as part of the transfer, so bringing your domains over also brings them under cover automatically. A small number of TLDs do not permit privacy at the registry level, and those are the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of common extensions are fully included.

It also follows the direction the wider industry is already heading. Earlier this year we covered how ICANN tightened its 2026 privacy rules, and building free domain privacy into every domain keeps you comfortably ahead of where those requirements are going next. Privacy stops being something you chase after the fact and becomes part of the domain itself.

What This Means for You

The takeaway is simple. Every domain you register or transfer now includes free domain privacy at no extra cost, your personal contact details stay off the public WHOIS by default, and the modest change to base pricing means most people who used to pay for privacy now pay less overall. There is nothing you need to switch on and nothing to remember to renew.

If you have been putting off registering a domain because you did not want your details published, or did not want to pay just to hide them, that reason is now gone. Take a closer look at the domain privacy protection now built into every single domain MonsterMegs offers.