Efty Pricing: What Efty Costs Per Month and the Portfolio Where It Pays Off

Efty Investor costs between $22 and $249 a month, priced by how many domains you hold rather than how much you sell, with 16 percent off for annual billing and a 7 day trial. When a name sells through Efty Pay you pay 5 percent if the nameservers pointed at Efty when the buyer paid, and 12.5 percent if they did not. Those are the numbers. The harder question is the one the pricing page cannot answer: at your portfolio size and your sell-through rate, does the subscription earn its keep?

Short version: the plan fee is rarely what decides it. For most portfolios the subscription is the third largest line in the budget, behind renewals and behind commission, and it is dwarfed by the cost of holding names that will never sell. Work the arithmetic below on your own book before you start the trial.

What Efty costs per month

Every plan from Basic upward includes the same core stack: for sale landing pages, the Domain Shop, DNS management, payment integrations, financial reporting and the smart tools. What the higher tiers buy you is headroom and integrations, not a better chance of selling.

Plan prices read from a capture of Efty's pricing page dated 20 August 2026. Efty blocks automated requests to its own site, so treat these as reported rather than re-read today and confirm before you subscribe.

What commission does Efty charge on top?

Efty Pay charges 5 percent when the sold domain's nameservers point at Efty at the moment of purchase, and 12.5 percent when they point anywhere else. That structure took effect on 1 March 2025. Domain Name Wire reported the 5 percent rate in September 2025 and DomainInvesting repeated it in February 2026, so the headline number is well corroborated. The 12.5 percent condition is the part that catches people.

The practical reading: Efty discounts the rate for names it is actually hosting and marketing. If you negotiate a sale privately and reach for Efty only as a checkout, you pay two and a half times the advertised rate. At 12.5 percent that is above what most commission marketplaces charge on their entry tier. Efty Pay is optional either way, so an independent escrow closing costs you nothing beyond the plan fee, and on a large deal that is usually the cheaper route. We compare the rails and the commission structures on the Efty alternative page and across every venue in domain broker fees.

Renewals cost more than the subscription

This is the line item that decides whether Efty pays off, and it has nothing to do with Efty. Fifty .com names renewing at roughly $12 to $15 retail cost you $600 to $750 a year. The Basic plan that holds those fifty names is $222 on annual billing. The software is a third of what the inventory costs you to keep.

That gap is about to widen. Verisign is raising the wholesale .com price 7 percent, from $10.26 to $10.97, effective 1 November 2026, and Domain Name Wire reported in April that the price could reach $13.42 by the end of the current contract cycle if every permitted increase is taken. Registrars pass that through. If you are carrying names on the assumption that renewals are cheap and static, the next six weeks are a good time to revisit which ones deserve another year. Our notes on domain portfolio management go through how to decide what to cut.

When does Efty pay for itself?

Take the fifty name portfolio on Basic. Annual costs: about $222 for the plan, call it $675 for renewals, so $897 before you sell anything. One sale at $2,000 through Efty Pay at 5 percent nets $1,900, which covers the year and leaves roughly $1,000. The subscription is not the obstacle. One modest sale clears it comfortably.

The obstacle is sell-through. Reliable figures are scarce because most venues do not publish them, but one well-documented data point exists: NameTalent reported in February 2019 that BrandBucket had roughly 54,000 names listed and had sold 4,538 in five years, about 908 a year, which works out to a 2.3 percent annual sell-through. Apply 2.3 percent to fifty names and you get slightly more than one sale a year. Apply the roughly $1,280 average reported sale price we calculate from public sales data, and that single sale grosses $1,280, nets $1,216 after Efty Pay, and leaves about $319 after the plan and renewals.

That is the honest middle case: positive, but thin enough that one bad assumption flips it. It also explains why experienced investors obsess over acquisition price rather than tooling. A portfolio bought well throws off sales that make every subscription question irrelevant. A portfolio of names nobody wants will not be rescued by better landing pages at any monthly price.

Is Efty worth it for a small portfolio?

At $22 a month, yes, if your names attract inquiries. The plan pays for itself on a single four figure sale and the reporting alone is worth something when tax season arrives. The case collapses in one specific scenario: you hold twenty or thirty names that nobody searches for, you pay twelve months of fees, and nothing sells. The subscription did not cause that outcome, but it did add a recurring cost to a portfolio that was already losing money on renewals.

There is a related trap worth naming. Efty's landing pages are genuinely well built, with a decade of conversion data behind the templates, and that quality can mask the real problem. A page converting 4 percent of ten visitors a year is still zero sales. Before you spend time tuning how a for sale page persuades, check that anyone is arriving to be persuaded, which is the same discipline you would apply to any page whose job is to turn visitors into buyers. Traffic first, conversion second.

Efty pricing versus commission-only selling

The alternative structure is to pay nothing monthly and give up a percentage when a name sells. On pure arithmetic Efty usually wins: a 100 domain portfolio on Launch runs about $292 a year plus 5 percent, while a commission marketplace at 12 percent costs more at every volume that matters. The reason anyone chooses commission anyway is distribution. Afternic takes 15 percent with its nameservers because it puts your name into registrar search results at the moment someone checks availability, and no subscription reproduces that.

So the comparison is not $292 against a commission rate. It is $292 against whether the sale happens at all. If buyers already find you, Efty is the cheaper path and you should take it. If your names sit silent, paying a percentage on a sale that would not otherwise have occurred is better than paying a subscription against nothing. The full cost comparison works this through at several sales volumes, including the roughly $35,200 of annual sales where the unpointed 12.5 percent rate stops being cheaper.

What to do before you start the trial

Price the names first. Every calculation above turns on two inputs you probably have not measured: what your names are actually worth, and how many of them are worth renewing at all. A subscription decision made without those numbers is a guess, and a 7 percent renewal increase in November makes the cost of guessing slightly higher than it was last year.

Run the portfolio through a bulk appraisal and sort by value. If the top of the list holds names with real comparable sales behind them, Efty or any decent venue will serve you and the monthly fee is noise. If the list is flat and low, the useful move is not choosing software. It is cutting the names that will not sell before the renewal invoices land, and putting the saved money into fewer, better ones.