Two things: Renewals are how registrars make money. They assume that once you register a domain for cheap, you will want to keep it. The money they lose on the registration is more than recouped by gouging you for renewals. Use a website like https://tld-list.com/tld/tech to compare prices and get a better deal. Donuts registered a very, very, very large number of TLDs. Each costs them $250k per year to maintain. They need to recoupe operational costs, so they slap a premium tag on as many domains as they can and charge you extra for it. Donuts is not the only registry that does this. The .co registry thinsk anything 4 characters or shorter is premium. .site, .host, etc all charge extra for <= 3 characters. If your domain is not premium, you should not be paying $50 for a .tech - going rate should be ~$20 +/- $5. More on reddit.com

I'm still considering the free domain offer attached to my hosting package, but all the domains seem to be charged at $16 per year after renewal? I saw your later comment, and I definitely don't want to pay much more than $16 next year for a side project. Has the price inflation happened to you? (I know it's not a lot of money but the base price would be cheaper than Network Solutions who I've been with for years). More on reddit.com

Porkbun.com They won't charge you 15 bucks on renewal. Most of the others offer you an 8.88something domain but then renewals are 14something. Porkie does not. More on reddit.com

The catch is, these numbers are about lowball averages and servers are about available resources. This is shared hosting, so if one of your sites starts taking off and spiking the CPU and memory, they will try and make you upgrade to a dedicated server with more resources or shut you down completely. Now, you can certainly do this approach and move them as they grow. Just be prepared. I've had blog posts go viral and shut down by 1&1, ICDsoft, and more. Never register your domains with the server company so you can easily move them to another host. More on reddit.com