I&#x27;m not sure if the exact amount of $7.85 is necessary (there&#x27;s definitely a decent profit margin there), but charging a registry fee is definitely necessary. There are a lot of costs that go into running a registry. This is my understanding of what running a gTLD registry looks like today (I run a registrar, so I&#x27;m on the other side of the picture, so I may be missing a few things).<p>$185,000 application fee (+50k if a technical review is required)<p>$6,250 fee per quarter<p>$0.25 per transaction (registration, renewal, or transfer)<p>More fees I&#x27;m forgetting<p>You also must run&#x2F;maintain a bunch of other programs&#x2F;services like: (this is the bulk of the cost of running a registry) shared registration system (SRS) that implements EPP (used by registrars to register&#x2F;update domains), whois service, abuse prevention&#x2F;mitigation, rights protection, dns services, zone file distribution, data escrow, DNSSEC, etc...