What happened to .tk
Freenom ran the registry behind .tk, .ml, .ga, .cf and .gq and handed the names out for nothing. It was, for a decade, the default answer to "where do I get a free domain". Then it stopped issuing new free registrations and wound the programme down following legal action over the volume of abuse hosted on those namespaces.
The mechanism matters more than the headline. These were never registrations in the sense a .com is — they were revocable allocations. A name could be reclaimed at the registry's discretion, and plenty were, with no transfer window and no meaningful appeal.
The test that tells you if you are exposed
Ask one question about any free domain: who benefits from you keeping it? If the answer is nobody, the arrangement is charity, and charity ends.
A community subdomain like eu.org or is-a.dev is run by people whose entire purpose is handing them out, on infrastructure that costs almost nothing to keep running. A platform subdomain exists because it makes the platform's product work. Both have a reason to persist. A free top-level domain funded by monetising typo traffic does not.
Which free routes actually survive
Community subdomains are the durable option. They never renew, they never invoice, and the organisations behind them have run them for years. The trade is that you are a guest in someone else's namespace, and good names go first.
Platform subdomains are equally durable but carry the platform's brand, which is fine until you want to move. Point a real domain at the same deployment and you can leave whenever you like — precisely the property free TLDs never had.
- Never renews, no invoice, run by a community: the safest free route available.
- Free for a year via a student pack: real ownership, but diary the renewal the day you claim it.
- Free while bundled with hosting: you own it, but the price is attached to a plan you must keep paying.
- Free with no visible funding model: treat as temporary, whatever the marketing says.
If you are on one now
Move your DNS to a registrar you pay, even a cheap one, and keep the free name as a redirect while it lasts. A .com renewal costs less than losing every inbound link you have ever earned.
And keep the content in Git. The best protection against any host or registrar disappearing is that moving is a twenty-minute job rather than a rebuild.
