DNS hosting
Each provider is profiled from its own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure. Two of these charge nothing at all, one charges per zone and per million queries, and one charges for the zone by the hour — so the number that matters is not the headline but what it counts. If you arrived from theDNS tools, this is where the records you were checking are actually served from.
DNS hosting
| Provider | Entry paid plan | What is metered | Pricing model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Route 53 | $0.50 per hosted zone per month for the first 25, then $0.10 for each additional zone. Extra record sets within a zone are $0.0015 a month each. | Per hosted zone and per million queries, with the zone rate falling fivefold after the first 25 and the query rate halving after the first billion. Health checks and DNS firewall rules are metered separately again. | Per hosted zone and per million queries, with the zone rate falling fivefold after the first 25 and the query rate halving after the first billion. Health checks and DNS firewall rules are metered separately again. |
| bunny.net DNS | Not documented | Nothing per zone and nothing per query up to 500 zones — the only charge is a $1 minimum on the account, and only if DNS is all you use. Past 500 zones the page says contact sales. | Nothing per zone and nothing per query up to 500 zones — the only charge is a $1 minimum on the account, and only if DNS is all you use. Past 500 zones the page says contact sales. |
| Cloudflare DNS | None for DNS itself. The product page prices it at nothing and names no paid DNS tier; what a Cloudflare account costs is decided by the other products on it. | Free, with no separate meter for zones or queries. DNS comes with any Cloudflare plan rather than being priced on its own. | Free, with no separate meter for zones or queries. DNS comes with any Cloudflare plan rather than being priced on its own. |
| DNSimple | $0.50 per hosted zone per month on Solo, which is free for one user; 50,000 queries per zone per month are included, then $0.80 per million. Teams is $29/month including one seat, with 500,000 queries per zone and $0.60 per million after. | Per zone and per query, with the seat free on Solo. Both meters loosen as the plan rises: Teams doubles nothing but raises the included queries tenfold and lowers the overage rate. | Per zone and per query, with the seat free on Solo. Both meters loosen as the plan rises: Teams doubles nothing but raises the included queries tenfold and lowers the overage rate. |
| Google Cloud DNS | No minimum and no plan. A managed zone costs $0.000273973 an hour — about $0.20 a month — and queries are $0.40 per million up to a billion, $0.20 above that. No magnitude is recorded because an hourly zone rate is not a monthly plan fee. | Two meters, one of them hourly. Managed zones are billed per hour — $0.000273973 for the first 25, falling twice above that — and queries by the million, with routing-policy queries priced higher than regular ones. | Two meters, one of them hourly. Managed zones are billed per hour — $0.000273973 for the first 25, falling twice above that — and queries by the million, with routing-policy queries priced higher than regular ones. |
Which to consider
A 100% uptime commitment on your nameservers, which only Google matches here, plus the AWS integrations — alias records to load balancers and CloudFront, health checks, and IAM on the zone itself.
Up to 500 zones with no query fees and no per-zone charge, from a company that will also serve the traffic. The only cost is a $1 minimum on the account, and only if DNS is the one thing you use there.
Any domain you are already putting behind Cloudflare. Authoritative DNS on its anycast network costs nothing, meters nothing, and has no volume at which that changes — the query bill other providers charge simply does not exist here.
Teams that want DNS as a product rather than a loss leader: $0.50 per zone, 50,000 queries each, an API, domain registration and access control — priced openly at every tier including the overage rate.
An estate already on Google Cloud, where DNS should be another line on the same bill and another resource in the same IAM. Zones are billed by the hour and queries by the million, with no plan to pick and no minimum to clear.