DNS is cheap until you have huge volume
Managed DNS is a rounding error for normal sites; it scales only with query millions and health checks. Longer TTLs cut billable lookups. Related: CDN cost calculator.
DNS pricing: pennies that matter at scale
Managed DNS bills per hosted zone (~$0.50/month) and per million queries (~$0.40). A small site's DNS costs less than a coffee yearly. The line items that change that: health checks ($0.50–$0.75 each monthly — a 20-endpoint failover setup is $150/year), geo-routing policies billed at a higher query rate, and DNSSEC signing on some providers. Query volume scales with TTL choices — a 60-second TTL on a busy record multiplies queries 5× versus five minutes. Free tiers at Cloudflare handle unlimited queries for most use cases, making paid DNS mostly a compliance or failover-features decision.