In terms of costs, keeping a few kb for the domain and associated contacts is almost nothing. Providing an API for resellers that is up 24h/24 is a bit more exp

In terms of costs, keeping a few kb for the domain and associated contacts is almost nothing. Providing an API for resellers that is up 24h/24 is a bit more expensive but still doesn't justify the 8$/m. What's probably the biggest costs is the DNS servers. Verisign does have to have to maintain beefy DNS servers to reply to all .com subdomains queries.