As previously pre-announced via our status feed, the cost of domain registrations will be going up on January 15th, 2012 from $8.99/year to $9.49/year.
There’s really not much to add other than that. This is in response to a change by our registrar, who are responding to Verisign once again exercising the “because we said so” clause in their license to print money, which allows them to raise prices by a percentage every year for no reason at all.
We do have long-term plans in this area, including trying to break loose pricing on gTLDs other than .com to help them compete, but nothing coming to fruition in a timeframe that would affect any decision making anyone has to do about this.